This article explores legal consciousness in contemporary British theatre. It is concerned with the messages conveyed about law in society as experienced through participant-observation and textual analysis. The interpretation of meaning will take place within the legal consciousness framework of collective dissent developed by Halliday and Morgan. Using this framework, this article will show that dissent is a reoccurring theme in these performances, with the legitimacy of state law under challenge. Alternative visions of law are pluralistic in nature. By applying a collective dissent narrative to this study, the article tests and further develops collective dissent as an analytical tool for examining legal consciousness for cultural legal studies. Through this framework, it also advances the study of theatrical performance for cultural legal studies in terms of what dramaturgic images, observational and textual, say about the relationship between law and society; specifically, to determine what theatrical performance of British contemporary theatre says about the law in this snapshot of time and place.

本文探讨了当代英国戏剧中的法律意识。它关注通过参与者观察和文本分析所体验到的关于社会法律的信息。对意义的解释将在哈利代和摩根提出的集体异议的法律意识框架内进行。使用该框架，本文将表明异议是这些表演中经常发生的主题，而州法律的合法性正面临挑战。法律的其他观点本质上是多元的。通过将集体异议叙述应用于本研究，本文测试并进一步发展了集体异议，作为分析工具来检验文化法律研究的法律意识。通过这个框架，它还从戏剧性的图像，观察性的和文本性的角度对法律与社会之间的关系提出了要求，从而促进了文化法律研究的戏剧表演研究。具体来说，是要确定英国当代剧院的文艺演出在时间和地点的快照中对法律有何评论。