The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre

Abstract

The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre is an enjoyable read ‘about the interplay of law, politics and history’ (1). It is the first book that assesses this multiple relationship within the context of theatre. Yet, we have a certain familiarity with law and politics engaging with each other; their connexion has been explored, amongst others, by critical legal studies scholars. Taking a clearly political position, this strand of scholarship was particularly concerned about legal education. Unpacking the law meant explaining to prospective lawyers that it is, first and foremost, ‘a political instrument wielded to political purposes’ (12). Legal formalism still draws a divide between the law and the non-legal variables that influence it. As legal scholars, our ‘law job’ is to teach students a welldefined state of mind. Besides a series of ‘behavioural habits’ that will ‘equip them nicely for life as professional lawyers’ (13), we explain to them that the closure of the law to contexts secures its neutral character. The critical legal geographer Nicholas Blomley terms this closure ‘bracketing’, since it constructs ‘a boundary within which interactions take place more or less independently of their surrounding context’. Bracketing is value-laden and ideologicallymotivated. Once enshrined in legal texts, ideology is carefully crafted to fix its legal objectivity and inspire ‘deference’ and ‘unquestioning attitude’ in students, allowing ‘the legal hierarchy’ to perpetuate ‘itself, from one generation to another’ (13). In The Play of Law, interdisciplinary research runs counter to the idea of the autonomy of the law. Ward calls for lawyers’ closer commitment in the life of our political communities. He argues that legal devices must be assessed in context, taking into consideration that their full understanding entails a full understanding of all the variables that affect them. The law is not an empty box incapsulating ‘anonymous authority and power’. Quite the opposite: external factors pragmatically enrich its meaning. My understanding of Ward’s argument is that he also aims to go beyond the mainstream relationship between law and power. As it usually focuses on how ideology is encoded through law, it still represents a form of bracketing, where the law-power interplay is conveyed by means of implicatures, i.e. a linguistic interpretation of the meaning of the law which merely asks ‘what is hinted at by an utterance in its particular context, what the sender’s “agenda” is.’ Ward is interested in a different visualisation of the law, which manifests itself in British drama as written and ‘performed over the previous half-century’ (1). Modern theatre allows him to stage a critical, cross-disciplinary, and contextual