If You Please (S'il Vous Plaît) is a Dada–Surrealist play co-written by the French surrealist writer and theorist André Breton and poet and novelist Philippe Soupault.
If You Please was written several years before the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto when Breton was primarily associated with Dada.
The original performance was on March 27, 1920 at the Salle Berlioz in Paris[1] and was part of a larger Dada program that "included Tzara's Zurich success La Premiere Adventure céleste de M. Antipyrine [The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine], Le Serin muet [The Silent Serin] by Ribemont-Dessaignes, Le ventriloque désaccordé [The Untuned Ventriloquist] by Paul Dermée, and Picabia's Manifeste cannibale dans l'obscurité [The Cannibal Manifesto in the Dark].
"[2] Breton and Soupault previously collaborated on Les Champs Magnétiques [The Magnetic Fields], a novel that is one of the first instances of automatic writing.
This act ends with another cliché of the romantic melodrama, murder at the hands of a jilted lover, but turned on its head.
Act III features an encounter between Mixime, a thirty-year-old man, and Gilda, a prostitute, who meet in a café.
They exchange seemingly incoherent dialogue: MAXIME: The kingdom of the skies is peopled with assassins.
Bettina Knapp writes[4] that the fourth act proceeds as follows: "The theater plunges into semi-darkness.
Finally the call for 'Author' is heard, and instead of Breton and Soupault walking out onstage two other actors take their place."