Part of this year’s Malta Arts Festival, Please, Continue (Hamlet) will blend Shakespeare’s tragedy with real-life members of the Maltese judiciary. Veronica Stivala calls Yan Duyvendak to the witness stand.

It was 2011, and Roger Bernat and Yan Duyvendak were in the midst of exchanging e-mails in which they discussed what was troubling them about society. They had both read the records of the Guantanamo trials and were both shattered by what they had read and wished to use this as material for a production. It proved too obscene to act out these trials though and they quickly scrapped the material.

Yet, they continued on the subject of justice, went to see a lot of trials, and received a real case file from a befriended lawyer.

“The content of this file really touched us,” recalls Duyvendak, one half of the creator and director duo. “These people were so stupid, but the story was so touching. They did what they could, as best as they could.”

Intriguingly, Roger and Yan had two opposite reactions to this case: Roger thought they should have been convicted, Yan thought this was useless and wrong.

They continued to work with the idea of bringing reality (a real case) to fiction (the theatre) but kept hitting a brick wall with the real cases appearing too obscene on stage. Their Eureka moment was when, out of despair (they already had a set opening night, just three weeks away) they tried turning things around: bring theatre into reality, in order to show, through fiction, how reality works.

And so Please, Continue (Hamlet) was born, a unique theatre experience, where members of the audience participate directly in the performance, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. The performance, if you will, is structured like a criminal court trial, with the jury randomly made up of audience members who are informed of the elements of the case at hand.

Shakespeare’s play provided perfectly for the plot ingredients. A real case is incorporated into the Bard’s famous work, focusing on Polonius’s murder and modified slightly so that it is possible that Hamlet was not aware that someone was hiding behind the curtain.

The play comprises real judges, lawyers, prosecutors, clerks, bailiffs, recruited from the Bar in each town. In Malta, our own members of the judiciary will be participating, applying the local law to Hamlet. The fact that “the project shows the possible beauty of justice as well as the humane side of justice” is what encourages magistrates, judges, and so on to participate. While the adjudicating panel receive the police file, there are no rehearsals, plus, it is a different crew each time round, meaning that the production is different each night. Even the length varies.

With so much of the production being real-life and with so many of the characters not being actors – there is no written text – how can this be considered a theatre play?

Yan explains how the three actors (Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude), also local, receive the same file, and re-enact the incident through a sketch of the apartment where things happened. They thus know who saw what, who did what at what moment, and maybe who lied, when and why. During the trial, they can answer any question posed to them, remembering what happened in the reconstitution.

A unique theatre experience, where members of the audience participate directly in the performance, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality

“This is funny,” comments Duyvendak, because “they are actually remembering something, which makes it look real”. This helps the judges ‘forget’ that this is a play and to act, if you will, as they do in their usual job. “They act, as they want, that is, they use their theatrical tools as they find fit, in order to win: Hamlet and his mother Gertrude wants Hamlet to be set free at the end of the trial, and Ophelia wants him convicted. They can try different ways in each trial,” explains Duyvendak.

In short, what Duyvendak and Bernat are doing is playing with the roles we play in real life and life itself, and attempting to present a specific perspective on problematic aspects of society. In Duyvendak’s words, “we don’t care so much about theatre, or theatrical elements. What is important for both of us is to find a coherent and interesting way of giving a specific perspective on the problematic things in our society.”

Please, Continue (Hamlet) has been a hit, playing to audiences the world over, with some wonderful stories emerging in each production. “It is really beautiful to see how extremely seriously members of the judiciary take their job,” observes Yan, adding how, of course, there is always a party who loses. For one of their performances in France, the best Parisian lawyer – whom everybody came to see – actually lost; in Berlin, a young lawyer pleaded for the first time, with success, in front of one of the biggest judges in the country, which then had a positive influence on his career.

On an equally positive note, Yan admits before they started the project, he and Bernat had a rather negative opinion of the justice system. “Now, after five years of touring in 11 different countries and almost 150 trials, I have a very deep respect for the people who do this incredible job. Everywhere we go, we meet legal professionals who want to improve the justice system, while adapting it to the local culture. It might not be a perfect system, but it’s the best we have!”

Please, Continue (Hamlet) takes place on July 17 at the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Valletta.

www.maltaartsfestival.org