The Birmingham Repertory Experience

I am neither an actor nor a performer, though there are some who would take issue with this statement. On Wednesday 06 January, 2021, I made my way to the Birmingham Rep, which had been set up as a ‘Nightingale’ or emergency court to help claw back the backlog in the criminal justice system in Birmingham. I was representing a young man accused of Robbery and Theft. As he was on bail this was to be the venue for his trial on a date that had been set as far back as June last year.

I was curious to know how they had adapted the theatre that was to be used as a court and brimming with excitement, in the knowledge that henceforth I could say such things as ‘I have appeared at the Birmingham Rep’ or ‘I once trod the boards at the Birmingham Rep’. I would have, for one event only, been in the same space occupied by such doyennes of the performing arts as Dame Judi Dench and stalwart performers like Sir Lenny Henry, to name but a couple.

The ‘courtroom’ itself was interesting. It looked like a cross between an examination hall and a space created for the performance of magic or illusions, with the desks and attendant chairs set out at socially distanced intervals, each with its own sanitizer dispenser and black curtains draped around the large room. Looking up one could see an array of rigging and gantry like structures supporting spotlights and the like. One could easily imagine special effects, illusions and magic!

I took my place and looked in front of me. There was a slightly raised dais, just before where the stage would, if allowed, rise before one’s eyes, with some screens protruding from what may have been a black cloth suspended above the ground. In front of that was an interminably long, similarly suspended black surface housing some computer equipment and behind which sat the court clerk and usher. As I was taking this in, I hear the somewhat unfamiliar (in the circumstances) cry ‘Court Rise’ and the judge appeared from a point behind the scene I had just been taking in, and to my left, as if by magic. He almost floated to his place behind the screens first referred to.

The judge took one look at me and promptly told me that all references to the stage and performing arts had been exhausted in his time at that emergency court. I would like to say that I did not try to add to this experience, but that would not be giving a true account of what transpired. Let’s leave that there.

In all, it was an interesting experience, somewhat light in the midst of the strictures of the pandemic we are facing and my client found the whole experience magical as he was acquitted of both counts on the indictment. The intricacies of the mechanism by which this was achieved will undoubtedly appear like the greatest illusion of all to him.

Well done, HMCTS, Birmingham for coming up with such an inspired solution in these difficult times.