In your plays, you explore the fine line between the real world and the digital world.
Marion Siéfert
I have always been interested in the different ways we move through our contemporary world, whether through dreams, hallucination, denial, delirium, or imagination. The digital world is not only one of these ways, and part of the real world, but it also shapes our perception of reality to the point of replacing it. What we call “new technologies” is not simply a tool that makes our lives more convenient, nor is the issue merely about developing a “proper use” of them. Through these technologies unfolds an ideology of mass surveillance, with totalitarian and military aims. Following jeanne_dark, a piece that took place both in the theatre and on Instagram, I decided to create performances that address these technologies without using them. It is a way of defending and fully investing in my art: theatre. Theatre is an art of the presence together of bodies, an eminently physical art, therefore human and concrete. It may be the art best suited to representing the virtual turn our world has taken, because it introduces a gap, a distance necessary for analysis and thought.
In Bunker, you examine the effects of technology on language.
With Matthieu Bareyre, we chose to make the CEO of a major petrochemical group the central character of Bunker. At a time when we follow every whim or eccentricity of the new tech magnates, we felt it was important to pause and take a closer look at those who hold power over energy systems. These are discreet functionaries, often comfortable in the shadows of meetings and consulting rooms, whose rhetorical skill and high-ranking civil servant ethos conceal the dirty reality of their work: exploiting and shamelessly speculating on fossil resources whose extraction devastates our planet. Paul, played by Charles-Henri Wolff, is what one might call an “augmented man”: neural implants allow him to dispense with computer or phone interfaces and connect his body directly to digital systems, thereby increasing his performance. Paul is a character withdrawn from a world he no longer needs to experience sensorially; he believes that organising its data is enough. We chose to approach the figure of the great entrepreneur against the grain of a liberal version of history: not as a trailblazer who shapes History and defines an era, but as a deeply impressionable man; a puppet rather than a grand demiurge. What would become of human language subjected to the machine and its demand for performance? Technology infiltrates Paul’s language, reducing it to a purely performative function and turning it into a testing ground for apprentice sorcerers.
You were able to take part in an artistic residency at APHP – Assistance Publique–Hôpitaux de Paris.
It was Francesca Corona, artistic director of the Festival d’Automne in Paris, who offered me this residency in a neurosurgery department at La Pitié-Salpêtrière when I told her about the early stages of Bunker. Together with Matthieu Bareyre and actor Lorenzo Lefebvre, who plays the neurosurgeon, we were able to attend neurosurgical consultations with patients who had implants, observe deep brain operations, and meet patients suffering from aphasia, etc. The consultations with implanted patients left a particularly strong impression on me, as I was able to witness the gradual adjustment and calibration of the implants by the neurosurgeon. The results are quite spectacular, especially in cases of Parkinson’s disease, where you can see the tremors stop instantly when the surgeon activates the implants. Beyond the human intensity present in each exchange between doctor and patient, we were able to grasp the extremely blurred boundary between therapeutic intervention and cognitive enhancement.
How does the bunker take shape on stage?
When Matthieu Bareyre and I came up with the idea of this CEO living in seclusion with his daughter in a luxury bunker, I remember feeling that the play had something deeply theatrical about it, and that it echoed situations I had encountered in Racine, for instance in Britannicus, which opens in the antechamber of power. The enclosed setting becomes a lever for reclaiming what, to me, lies at the heart of theatre: being an art of presence and speech, unfolding in uninterrupted time. To bring the bunker to life on stage, we did not try to naturalistically reproduce the interior architecture of real luxury bunkers. Everything clicked when, together with Nadia Lauro, the visual artist and set designer of the play, we simply realised that the theatre itself—its very space, its stage cage—would be the bunker, and that the spatial logic was fundamentally paranoid. All we had to do was reveal and push to the point of grotesque exaggeration the security obsession that has seeped into every aspect of our lives in recent years, even into our cultural spaces.
You contrast speech with silence, but also speech with dance.
Several sources of inspiration informed this choice. First of all, the dancer Janice Bieleu herself. Since DU SALE ! in 2019, I had wanted to entrust her one day with a fictional character and to write that character based on her qualities and what I admire in her. The character of Ami owes a great deal to her. There was also a central question: how should one respond to perversion? Since it corrupts language and drains words of their meaning, speaking can seem futile, even dangerous, because anything said can be appropriated and turned against you at any moment. The dramaturgy also draws heavily on Matthieu Bareyre’s personal experience. He played a major role in driving the writing, and like Ami, he has sometimes felt in his life the urge “to stop pretending to speak.” From the outset, I sensed that this dynamic where one speaks and the other does not would become a compelling formal constraint for the staging, allowing me to rediscover the tension at the root of poetry: between speech and silence. In a world like ours, centred on language yet exhausting it, I wanted to defend lived experience: the body, its strength, and its vulnerability.
The characters represent forces. And if the stage is a field of forces, who truly controls it? Paul, who says everything? Ami, who says nothing? The mother, played by Monica Budde, who speaks and perceives what is happening in the bunker yet is physically absent? Or Thomas, the neurosurgeon, who manipulates Paul like a puppet? From that point on, staging becomes a matter of organising these different forces, both visible and invisible.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse in March 2026