A self-taught master

BERLIN first used Jansen as a character in its previous production Perhaps All The Dragons (2014), in which 30 audience members sat in front of screens, each of them learning about the lives of five from a cast of 30 real characters with extraordinary tales to tell. After researching the subject of master forgers but struggling to make contact with any—a lot of the very good ones have never been caught— Degryse read about Jansen in a newspaper.

"The big differences from other master forgers were that he was public because he had been caught, and could paint like approximately 18 masters—and he was totally self-taught."

After the show, he realised he wasn't finished with him as a character.

"I was thinking about the idea of fiction and non-fiction. Our roots at BERLIN are very documentary-based and we were trying to move into mixing the two. My first meeting with Geert Jan was the turning point in my thinking about this. As long as you don't know a work is a forgery, there's no problem. Imagine you're in a museum enjoying a painting and someone says in your ear: it's a fake. Everything is devalued. In our culture, supposedly a copy of something is always less. Geert Jan is the translation of a certain idea about the value of truth."