2017 House Programs Please Continue, Hamlet | Page 3

If you think that truth and artifice
are what separate the stage and
the courthouse, think again.
Actual lawyers and judges the world over have
taken to trial this case of a young man accused of
murder—himself an amalgam of one of theatre’s
most famous figures and a real-world case the
two creators had studied. If you think that truth
and artifice are what separate the stage and the
courthouse, think again.
Any actor will tell you that it’s the liveness of
theatre that gives it meaning, and that a work
doesn’t exist until it is performed. The same could
be said of justice. Each performance of Please,
Continue (Hamlet)—more than 150 to date—has
resulted in a different outcome. There’s more to
this than guilt or innocence.
How guilty is too guilty? How innocent is innocent
enough? From verdicts to sentences, and even the
very facts of the case at hand, justice is a complex
machine whose many parts are as unpredictable
as the humans through which they are incarnated.
The Victorian justice system is a long way from
the Guantanamo trials, but that’s where Please,
Continue (Hamlet) began.
As bent and broken men were cross-examined
about their supposed roles in the atrocity that
inaugurated a new era, their inability to get out
even the simplest of sentences was met again
and again with the same emotionless phrase:
Please, continue. Please, continue.
Please, continue.
On the other side of the world, Yan Duyvendak
and Roger Bernat were admirers of each other’s
work, and when they began to correspond
they discovered a mutual fascination with the
Byzantine dynamics of the Guantanamo Trials.
“We tried to bring those texts into the theatre
world but it was very obscene, you know? Very
over the top,” says Duyvendak. The pair knew
that the workings of the justice system were
what they wanted to explore, however, and their
investigations into this foundation of civic society
revealed the error in trying to bring a real case
into the fictional realm of theatre. What was
needed was a theatrical fiction to be brought into
the real world of justice. Please, Continue (Hamlet)
was born.
For the actors tasked with defending their role in
the shocking event at the core of Please, Continue
(Hamlet), the fictionality of their roles is rendered
appropriately hazy. There are no rehearsals, per
se, but in the lead-up to the production Duyvendak
and Bernat have their accused and two witnesses
physically play out the night that resulted in
death. “All three of them know who was where at
what moment, who saw what, who heard what,
who is pretending something else than what
really happened,” says Duyvendak. “So from this
experience they can answer all the questions that
will come in court.”
Any appearance in the docks is its own kind
of performance, after all. “They can use their
theatrical skills as they want to win,” says
Duyvendak. “If Ophelia wants to cry in order to
convince the jury then she can cry, if Hamlet
wants to get angry he can get angry.”
There’s a festival in Elsinore, Denmark, that only
presents productions of Hamlet. When Duyvendak
and Bernat were invited to stage their own,
festival organisers requested that it be performed
in English. No, came the response, since the local
legal fraternity works in Danish. The festival
manage