Ought Hamlet to have been prosecuted for the death of Polonius? A courtroom drama in more than one respect, Roger Bernat and Yan Duyvendak have created Please Continue (Hamlet), a fascinating piece in which one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters is literally put on trial for his actions. This is a theatrical experience that transcends the boundaries between reality and fiction in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude were all actors but the lawyers, judge, clerk, and psychiatric expert were professionals who were instructed to treat this case just like any other. Each night the experts are completely different people, sourced locally, meaning that each trial is unique. The production I saw was in France, following the French legal system, though it has been performed in several European countries, each true to their own judicial systems.
I realised that my sympathy for Hamlet as a character influenced how I viewed the case. In this particular production, Hamlet benefitted from an especially enthusiastic defence lawyer, who somewhat overshadowed any sympathy we felt for the depressed Ophelia.
Following the trial, the jury was selected randomly from the audience and given half an hour to settle on a verdict, under the guidance of a legal professional to keep things to time. The experiment was as much an examination of the ethics of Western judicial systems as it was of our interpretation of these characters. The statistics of previous decisions were read out, with outcomes ranging from condemning Hamlet to decades of incarceration, to completely letting him off.
Somewhat inevitably, true legal accuracy was held back by the limits of theatre and room for theatrical entertainment was faced with the limits of the legal realism. Admittedly, three hours of having to concentrate on an intense legal process in French is not how I usually choose to spend my Friday evenings. Nevertheless, this was an immersive, extremely thought-provoking experiment.
As the audience had no idea who would be chosen to participate in the jury, we had the unusual feeling of being actively, inescapably invested. The fourth wall was thus not merely broken but completely non-existent.
The trial also evoked a number of philosophical questions about the idea of determining guilt in such a context. The variation in verdicts despite the case file always being identical is a profound comment on the fallibility of any legal system. Indeed, rather than really determining Hamlet’s guilt or innocence, I found that this theatrical experiment simply highlighted the enigmatic nature of the character, as well as the difficulty of ever truly ascertaining someone’s motives beyond all reasonable doubt.
