Thinking the Unthinkable

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on the legal and political issues that arose during the so-called ‘war on terror’ in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Issues that were addressed, very directly, in a series of ‘verbatim’ plays written and produced in that moment. Amongst the most renowned were the so-called ‘Tribunal’ plays written by Richard Norton-Taylor. The genre, as the nomenclature suggests, sought to re-present various high-profile cases and judicial inquiries on the public stage. Whilst the chapter considers a number of different ‘verbatim’ plays, it focusses more closely on Norton-Taylor’s Called to Account. This play is unusual in that it presents a ‘virtual’ history of a fictitious trial, on war crimes charges, of the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In so doing, it challenges the defining pretence of the ‘verbatim’ genre; that the simple presentation of legal and quasi-legal transcript confirms the veracity of the text.