Courtroom proceedings, as anyone who's spent much time in one will tell you, score low on entertainment value.

The hours may be short (they seldom sit before 10.30 and they've risen by four) but the passages of intense, mind-wandering tedium are plenty long enough to make up for it.

Yet sprinkled between the monotony there are moments, just moments, of the most intense human drama.

Those are the bits you read about in the next day's newspapers. But to Richard Norton-Taylor, a man not unused to writing them up for exactly that purpose, they began to represent something more.

For the last five years, he has made it part of his job to extract those nuggets of drama and turn them into popular and relevant pieces of theatrical entertainment.

In the case of the inquiry into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, this entailed reducing 11,000 pages of transcript to just 100; two hours of dialogue from 70 days' deliberation.

It's a very un-journalistic arena, the theatre. But Norton-Taylor's version of the Lawrence transcript (for which he receives the unusual theatrical credit of 'editor') has been playing to gratifyingly enthusiastic audiences in the West End for much of this year. BBC2 televised it, too. Now, with support from the West Yorkshire Playhouse, it is about to traverse Britain.

"There is something inherently theatrical about courtrooms - and it's not harmed by the over-dramatic performances of the barristers," he says. "The jury is their audience.

"And for journalists, it's another medium for which to write. It's very much more satisfying, too: you actually see the bums on seats. You don't know how people are going to react to your articles when they're reading the paper over their cornflakes."

Norton-Taylor's first foray into the theatre was with an adaptation of the arms-to-Iraq inquiry. He followed it with edited highlights of the Nuremberg trials.

"The frustration of a journalist is that what you get published in a newspaper - a 500-word article or a feature at the most - is somewhat skewed. Here, you're getting material 'in' that you would never be able to get published conventionally."

Stephen Lawrence's family gave its consent to having the inquiry turned into an evening's entertainment. The tribunal approved, too, but the heavily-criticised Metropolitan Police were not asked.

"I suppose their response would have been predictable," says Norton-Taylor. "But they didn't respond aggressively afterwards. Quite a few of them saw the production at Victoria Palace Theatre, just down the road from Scotland Yard."

The notion of adapting fact for the theatre is hardly new. But traditionally, playwrights have interpreted events and re-told them in their own creative voice.

In the Lawrence case, Norton-Taylor acknowledges, "there isn't a single word of my own in it. I've simply edited the transcripts.

"Even so, it's a rather subjective selection. I chose the extracts and in that sense it was a personal choice. I tried to be as objective as possible, though."

One could, he adds, have produced a more overtly theatrical production ("You could have had 20 or 30 cops parading on") but at the end of the day the drama is contained within the words themselves.

All the same, his experiences on the stage have taught him to think theatrically about other stories he covers as a journalist.

"I was wondering about doing the BSE inquiry - but I decided it wouldn't produce quite the same sort of drama."

The West End production taught him something, too, about the vanity of members of the legal profession.

"They saw themselves being portrayed by actors: their own words coming out of someone else's mouth. And one said to me, 'I was quite good, wasn't I?'"

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.