How did you come up with the idea for the play Neanderthal, which talks about genetics and our origins?
It was the spring of 2018 and I was listening to the radio. It was a programme about Swedish researcher Svante Pääbo, who’d achieved the technical exploit of extracting tiny fragments of DNA from very, very old bones. The scientists said those were Neanderthal bones. The idea of being able to “decrypt” something from those minute bits of cells several thousands of years old, and which somehow survived death, seemed crazy to me. And rather incomprehensible. So I started looking into it. I discovered Svante Pääbo’s book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. In this book which reads like a thriller, the biologist recalls the 35 years of research which led to his discovery of the complete Neanderthal genome. He also explains how the comparison with our own DNA shows that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals intermingled over 40,000 years ago. The Neanderthals therefore didn’t go completely extinct. Part of their genes survived within us. Parallel to that, he also writes about his father Sune Bergström, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982, and who abandoned him at birth. It’s a hint which allows us to imagine how this obsession to study our origins and the desire to understand what we’re made of took root in him. I read it in only a few days. Then I decided to turn it into a show.
Although Neanderthal is based on this autobiography, on stage you talk about more than just the paleogeneticist.
I did use his story as the overarching narrative of the show, and borrowed a few anecdotes directly from it. But Neanderthal isn’t an adaptation. I’d say it’s a play very loosely inspired by the book. Our fiction focuses on the private and professional lives of five researchers, as well as on a father trying to make up with his son. Luca and Rosa, a couple of scientists living in California, meet Lüdo, a researcher obsessed by the desire to understand the origins of Man. In this three-person romance, personal questions spill over into their scientific research. Then you have Adèle, a paleogeneticist suffering from a degenerative memory disorder, who falls head over heels for Mila, the keeper of the oldest Neanderthal bones in Zagreb, while Jan, Lüdo’s father, tries to reconnect with the son he abandoned at birth… Like Svante Pääbo, I decided to create an ensemble. With six actors, we go through their romances and heartbreaks, their interrogations about filiation and their dashed hopes. We drew inspiration from Svante Pääbo’s stories, but also from those of Craig Venter, a former GI turned geneticist and whose genome was the first to be fully sequenced, and of Maja Paunovic, from the Zagreb Museum of Natural History, who provided the first useable Neanderthal bone samples. And of Rosalind Franklin, who discovered the structure of DNA, and of Gregor Mendel, widely seen as one of the pioneers of modern genetics… We dive into their private life. We see how it influenced their research, and vice versa, how their discoveries impacted their private life.
You like bringing biographies to the stage. To show us History through the stories of individuals. To bring together the private and the political. That was the case in En Route-Kaddish, about your grandfather. Doreen was inspired by André Gorz’s Letter to D. And it’s once again true of Neanderthal.
In my plays En Route-Kaddish, Doreen, Le silence et la peur, and Neanderthal, I do delve into the private lives of people who had an important impact on history: political history, but also the history of music, of art, of science. It’s a way for me to make them accessible, to demystify them. When I was researching Neanderthal, I wasn’t so much interested in the technical works of those biologists as in their quest in and of itself, in the path they had to travel to reach their goals. I think the way scientists can ponder seemingly naïve questions like “Why are we here?” or “Where do we come from?” is beautiful. It’s foundational. This desire for knowledge is part of who we are: we’re the only living beings to wonder about our origins. Up until now, I’ve chosen key moments in the private lives of individuals in order to speak about moments of a History that is greater than them, that transcends them, but of which they are also important actors. When I encountered Svante Pääbo’s story, I thought, “Here’s a biography that’s part of something much bigger, someone whose work challenges outdated ideas about our origins, which allows us to approach geopolitical conflicts and ecological challenges in a different way.”
You say that “we as Homo Sapiens are part of a long continuity made of interbreeding and mixing,” while at the same time, as an “invasive species,” as Jean-Jacques Hublin puts it, “we present a lasting threat to other living species,” when we are not creating the conditions for our own extinction. Would you say you are denouncing something?
No, it’s an observation and a call to action. Among all the hominid species, ours has lived on Earth for only a short time. Homo Erectus existed for much longer than us, and the same is true of Neanderthals. The appearance of Homo Sapiens led to the disappearance of Neanderthals. We are a species with an amazing capacity for adaptation, but we’re also an invasive species capable of coming up with a system, capitalism, which leads to the destruction of our biotope. When you look at it that way, we do have a responsibility towards our children, and our children’s children. Neanderthals may have disappeared, partly because their fertility rate plummeted, because they didn’t intermingle enough, and because their ecological niche went through a radical transformation at the same time as Homo Sapiens appeared. Knowing that, what’s happening nowadays seems even more striking. The fertility rate of Homo Sapiens is falling rapidly, and we’re destroying our own ecological niche at an unprecedented speed. The conditions for our extinction seem to mirror those that led to the disappearance of Neanderthals. I don’t think Homo Sapiens is going to disappear, but the parallel is most troubling. Furthermore, the work done by those geneticists contradicts all racist, racialist, and eugenicist theories. Svante Pääbo’s work confirmed that Homo Sapiens originated and spread from the African continent, some 70,000 years ago. We’re the descendants of those migrants. Then you had a period of intermingling between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. We’re the heirs to that. This research contributes to delegitimise racial wars, as well as the struggles for territory based on the idea of jus sanguinis or jus soli. Legitimacy isn’t granted by blood, but by History. Those scientists are helping write a History that ties us all together.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach