Bon Vivant

David Wurtzel reviews PESTS, a play by Vivienne Frantzmann and commissioned by theatre company Clean Break, at the Royal Court, Jerwood Theatre. The play is now on tour.  

It was well worth reading the script of PESTS over dinner before seeing the show... 

It has always been my belief that victory is harder to manage than defeat. When human minds are focused on crisis, it may bring out the best outcome possible. Victory, however, is another story. Doubts enter minds. Factions arise. ‘What if?’ becomes the dominant question. The reason is simple: defeat is rarely total or permanent, hence the desire to rescue and reverse; and victory is neither complete nor forever, which ushers in the worries. These truisms were uppermost in my mind when I attended my college gaudy last week.  

Gaudies are held around every five years as a grand reunion party. Few people go to the early ones, because it is time to escape university and get on with life. A much larger group go to those held in their middle years: a combination of growing nostalgia and perhaps a wish to show friends and contemporaries the fruits of success. 

David Wurtzel reviews a fundraising performance of case excerpts, both real and fictional.  

Court 1 at the Central Criminal Court, which has seen enough drama in its time, was the suitable venue for ‘Trial and Error’, an evening of excerpts about cases both real and fictional which had taken place at the Old Bailey, some even in the very courtroom. It was devised by HH Judge Peter Rook QC and further scripted and directed by Anthony Arlidge QC, who also provided the narration as the ‘court clerk’. The two performances on 3 and 4 March were staged in aid of the Sheriffs’ and Recorder’s Fund which assists former offenders. Over £17,000 was raised. 

As a child I was given a short book written by the late Mr Justice Darling – a man who was known for his judicial wit, although his Spy pen-portrait bore the unkind legend “Judicial Lightweight”. I had high hopes of this book of legal gems. Alas, it was the dullest book I ever read with all his anecdotes, quips and aphorisms falling flat. It now lives in our lavatory for what my dear mama, when we were little, used to call “struggles”.  

Darling is not alone, however. With noble exceptions, the written anecdotes of lawyers are deeply dull. The reason is that we live in an oral tradition, whatever those civil practitioners and sillies who dreamt up the Criminal Procedural Rules think: a world where stories are told and retold in robing rooms, chambers and wine bars. A very great character in Silk when I was a young barrister, called Barry, despite it being none of his given names nor any recognised foreshortening of them, once paid me the honour of telling me the story I had told him six hours earlier about a case of mine but with Barry now in the title role – quite oblivious of the irony. The characters in these stories come to life because we knew them or know them still or, at the least, knew or know of them. 

Battle lines are drawn  

My party political allegiances remained pretty constant until the day I found myself driving behind a car that had a sticker on its rear windscreen.  Generally, I fi nd these proclamations very annoying. Top of my hate list is “Drive Carefully! Baby on Board!” Whenever I see this particular command, it coincides with a car that is being driven badly in some way – the last one cut me up having undertaken my car at high speed on the M4 – and has no baby in the vehicle at all, unless it has been placed in the boot. However, on this day of my political metamorphosis, I found the rear sticker not only completely failed to irritate me but actually expressed a thought that had been germinating in my head for some time. It read, simply and succinctly: “Don’t Vote! It Only Encourages Them.” 

The Calm Before The Storm 

Despite initial skirmishes, the phoney war between the publicly funded Bar and the Ministry of “Justice” continues while we wait for the real conflict to begin. Is the Public Defender scheme the plan B of which my mandarin friend warned me or is it yet another smokescreen to cover even more awful shenanigans deep in the Whitehall bunker? Andrew, our Senior Clerk, who hides a twitchy personality under a mask of assurance and confidence, came upstairs for our weekly Headmaster’s chat. It had long ago ceased to be enjoyable and now is simply a list of actual, putative, impending or imaginary crises.  

The 2005 and 2013 legal reporting reforms have given rise to initiatives and new images which feed into a new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project: Judging Images: the making, management and consumption of judicial images. Leslie J Moran reflects upon this project and on Isobel Williams’s work.  

Isobel Williams is not so much a courtroom artist, commissioned to produce court pictures for an image hungry media, but an artist interpreting her courtroom  experiences in words and pictures. Her licence to draw in the Supreme Court is indicative of a new relationship between courts and visual media. 

Blogging artist Isobel Williams on her work in the highest court in the land.  

Since July 2012 I have been an occasional blogger-with-a-difference in the Supreme Court, with the court’s permission. The difference is that I illustrate my blog with drawings which I do on the spot; I rarely embellish them afterwards. 

A strike or not a strike? That is the question.  

Everybody has returned from the seasonal festivities absent the traditional good cheer. The clerks have “accidentally” discovered a working party report from a sub-committee chaired by one or other of the brothers Twist – a committee that I have to confess I had no idea I had appointed and probably never did – that has recommended our staff take the same pay cut proposed for us by a Ministry of Justice that increasingly looks better equipped to be engaged in the used-car trade. 

Shakespeare’s Globe actors were joined by Members of Gray’s Inn for a special staged reading of Supposes, written in 1556 by George Gascoigne, a fellow Gray’s Inn Member. The rarely played drama returned to the Hall in which it was first performed. James Wallace, the director, and Master Roger Eastman, one of the barrister/actors, reflect on the day.  

The chance to do the very first play written in English prose in the actual building where it was first performed doesn’t come around too often. That play, Supposes, is: “A Comedy written in the Italian tongue by Ludovico Ariosto, Englished by George Gascoigne of The Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn, Esquire, and there presented.” It was acted by lawyers in 1566 in the same Hall to which, 447 years later on 3 November 2013, Shakespeare’s Globe brought its Read Not Dead on the road project. Joining the professional actors were four current Gray’s members, who bravely took the stage at 3pm for a fully staged script-in-hand performance after only beginning rehearsals at 10am.