Page 44 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Man in the Gallery with the Writing on His Face 35

Services. Despite the courtroom exchange of accusations and confidences
receiving a consistently high level of media attention in the UK, this general
tone of condemnation remained widespread. Commentaries also tended to
focus on the appearance of a group of regular attendees at the Inquest whose
committed engagement with the trial was read as further evidence that it was a
wasteful exercise - their perceived eccentricity being the proof of this
particular pudding. This essay will examine the characterisation of this
audience body, employing models of analysis arising from performance and
theatre studies to examine their persistent presence as a mode of social
performance and to account for the meanings attached to it in media
commentary.
Developments in performance studies and theatre semiotics, through
Richard Shechner‘s definition of performance as ‗restored behaviours‘
[Schechner, p. 22], Victor Turner‘s concept of the ‗social drama‘ [Turner],
Erving Goffmann ‘s explorations of staging and scripting, of ‗back region‘ and
‗front region‘ spaces in social interactions equating to theatre‘s backstage and
frontstage [Goffman], and Keir Elam‘s, Patrice Pavis‘ and Elaine Aston and
George Savona‘s (building on Charles S Pierce) contributions to semiotic
analysis [Elam] [Pavis, pp. 208-212] [Aston] [Peirce], have established the
complex reading of social performance, of societal ritual and of the staging of
events of public significance, and of the narratives which emerge from these
events. Such analyses focus on the performative address of language and
action in the social event, the qualities of enactment, presence and
representation at play in such instances and, through semiotic analysis of the
performance, the symbolic encoding and decoding of the event‘s meanings.
Applied to the analysis of legal proceedings, theatre and performance studies
models suggest the possibility of a performance analysis of the ‗live‘ events of
the courtroom and the representational practices at work both within it and in
its subsequent replaying and mediation in the wider social world. They provide
a theoretical basis for consideration both of the commonplaces of the
‗theatrical metaphor‘ as they are habitually applied to the forms of staging and
address present in the courtroom – focusing on costuming, the performed
rhetoric of advocacy, the roles of jury and gallery as audience to this ‗playing‘
- and to the reading of performance as a thread of representational process
which weaves through all social interaction but which is particularly
intensified within the heightened formality of the courtroom.
Pavis‘s famous questionnaire [Pavis, pp. 230-231] sought to establish a
system of analysis for the theatrical event, developing the precise evaluation of
the meaning of its constituent parts, including dramaturgical and theatrical