Tonight in a courtroom in Melbourne, Hamlet Prince of Denmark goes on trial for the murder of his ex-girlfriend’s father, Polonius. At the end of a long evening of arguments from the prosecution and defence legal teams, evidence from a forensic pathologist, and deliberations by a jury of his peers, he will be found guilty or acquitted.
This scenario has such an earnest, academic flush to it, you might imagine it to be a ‘moot’ for the University of Melbourne law school, or a exercise for VCE drama students. Except that the lawyers are real lawyers (not students) and the judge is a real judge. The only ‘actors’ are the people playing Hamlet, and witnesses Ophelia and Gertrude.
Please, Continue (Hamlet) (playing at Melbourne Festival this week) is the work of theatre-makers Yan Duyvendak and Roger Bernat, and has played in 12 countries around the world since its 2011 premiere in Switzerland (where Duyvendak is based, alternating with France). In each place the show is produced, real judges, barristers and legal teams duke out the case in a real courtroom, and according to the legal system of their country. And once the legal teams have made their final arguments, a jury of 12 is selected from among the audience members, and is given 20 minutes to come to a decision: to acquit or not to acquit (that is the question).
Duyvendak comes from a visual arts background, and describes himself as someone interested in making participatory works, and in the relationship between performer and audience. It’s this interest that drew him and Bernat to each other. In 2010, while corresponding with each other, they discovered another common interest: the Guantanamo trials. “We both had fallen upon the transcripts, which had appeared on the web – and we both had been very very shocked by it,” Duyvendak recalls, “because you really understand that it's a fake trial, where the lawyers who defend those men are being judged by a military commission comprised only of Americans.”
Sensing that the American military commissions were an important moment for human civilisation, Duyvendak and Bernat zeroed in on the ‘trial’ as a cog in the machinery of justice. “It was too indecent, really, to work directly with the Guantanamo situation,” Duyvendak explains, “but we started to go to criminal trials in France and Switzerland, and to research them in culture – watching films like 12 Angry Men, that kind of thing.”
Ultimately the two theatre-makers decided to recreate the trial environment for their audience – and bring a ‘fiction’ (the ‘Hamlet case’) into that very real environment, so that people could see how this “sophisticated, elaborate machine” works in practice.
Because the show aims to show people how their local justice system works, it is different in every country where it is performed – according to the system and laws of that jurisdiction. It’s also only performed in countries that have the jury system: “[otherwise] it would seem absurd to the audience, it wouldn’t make sense,” Duyvendak explains.
The final ingredient is a real-life case, which is integrated with Shakespeare’s scenario. Each legal team is working to a brief of evidence that contains elements from this real case, which a lawyer friend of Duyvendak’s was working on in 2010, in which a young man was accused of killing his girlfriend’s father. “[My friend] really risked his job, because he gave Roger and me the case file unredacted,” the theatre-maker says appreciatively. “We used the social context of that case [for Please, Continue]: it was a poor family in a poor area, with poor education and low income.”
Duyvendak says Hamlet was chosen because it seemed the most logical fiction under which to bury the real case, while also being a simple enough scenario to keep each show under four hours (though he cautions: “You have to realise that it’s not the Hamlet from Shakespeare, because in the play he really is guilty – he means to kill the person behind the curtain, but he thinks it is [his stepfather] Claudius.”)
Duyvendak argues that Shakespeare’s Danish royals and the community in which his real-life case took place are not as disparate as they might at first seem: “they settle things amongst themselves rather than going [to the authorities]; they don’t work – they’re getting money from the state.”
This real life case proved to be the grist for Duyvendak’s theatrical mill in a more crucial way, however: “After reading the file, Roger really felt that this [young man] should be convicted, that he was really stupid and should go to jail. But I felt the opposite; I felt it was not possible to give this person a sentence, because they were doing the best they can within their circumstances – it’s not that they are ‘bad’. And we found it very interesting that we had, in the same case, such a different opinion; we thought okay, we should try and make a machine where this discrepancy can happen amongst the people in the audience.”
Duyvendak says that talking to audience members and jury participants after performances of his show (where he acts as the master of ceremonies) has borne out this expectation. “What seems to happen to people during the show is that they change their opinion several times about whether Hamlet is guilty or innocent. This is particularly true when it comes to the final statements [by the legal teams], because you hear the different reasonings – and you find you can agree with both of them. I think it really makes you understand the complexity of justice system. And I think that’s why people from that system [lawyers, judges, court staff] participate in every city that we do the show – because they can see that we show that complexity.” (You can see the Melbourne legal professionals defending, prosecuting and presiding over Hamlet’s trial here.)
For those lucky audience members chosen to be in the jury (you won’t know until after the closing arguments), Please, Continue (Hamlet) offers the potential of a profound perspective shift: “People have told me that before they were a jury member, they always found that sentences were too light, and since they’ve been a jury, they find that sentences are too heavy,” says Duyvendak. “I think it’s because you understand the complexity of the human being, and that there are always reasons for people to do things, it never comes from nowhere. I think once you realise that, it makes [your perspective] more complex.”
You can hear Yan Duyvendak in conversation on Sat Oct 7 at 12.30pm at the Forum, as part of Melbourne Festival’s free artists-in-conversation series (register here).
Check out our hit list of the best things to see at Melbourne Festival.