La Distance tells the story of the relationship between a father and his daughter, the former living on Earth, the latter on Mars. Did you write a science fiction play?
This is science fiction because we cannot come up with a story set in 2077 without thinking about scientific progress—and especially about the impact of technological development on our lives. In a way, this play is as dystopian as it is realistic. I wanted to imagine the human species separated, now living on two planets. What happens to the love between a father and his daughter when the distance between them becomes interplanetary? There is a kind of metaphor here: this relationship could have been explored in the same apartment or in two different places on Earth. With La Distance, I stage a generational gap, two worldviews through two planets. What happens to these bonds when a journey of about eighteen months separates two individuals? What are the modes of communication? I tell this story from a macroscopic point of view, through distance, and a microscopic one, through the relationship… Without forgetting that today power lies in the hands of a digital oligarchy. This is intimate science fiction. I approached this question with two exceptional actors, Adama Diop and Alison Dechamps. The text of La Distance was conceived, composed, and tested for them and with them.
Through a relationship that is both intimate and cosmic, doesn’t La Distance play between anticipation and amplification?
Exactly. I focus a powerful lens to see something very small that will take place in fifty years. I do not give a precise description of our society in the future. I prefer to tell an intimate story, with all the vulnerability it can have in this context. This writing project came to my mind recently. It has been constantly nourished by what happens around us every day, so quickly. In the spirit of other dystopian works, I wanted to speak about nearby challenges that shape our collective future. We are currently inundated by dates and deadlines: 2030, 2050, etc. We live in an era of timelines. When we hear about global warming, we know everything is timed. We live in a time of shared anxiety because we sense, or are almost sure, that we will not be able to face the demands of science. This dissonance between a collective goal and the reality of political and economic powers is one of the paradoxes of our time. How will we explain this to future generations… It will be the symptom of what we are as a species: a profound contradiction between our immense capacity for creation and our sense of destruction. In this show, 2077 becomes a landmark date after these deadlines we have to meet. And if we missed those, how will it be experienced by ourselves and our descendants? La Distance reflects on the titanic task awaiting us over the next fifty years. But I feel it like someone who, after reading an encyclopaedia, finally writes a sonnet. It is an amplification through the miniature.
La Distance takes place in the future but carries the weight of our current concerns. Would you say it is a documentary about the future?
It is not a report about the future. La Distance embraces its lyricism. I approach something deeply rooted in our imagination. We are all “ancestors of the future,” and the future will hold us accountable. What will future generations think of our time when they see that 1% of the population held power and money and were the sole decision-makers? I look at my Portuguese ancestors from the 16th century as responsible for maritime expansion, colonisation, oppression, and the enslavement of entire peoples. Certainly, they were not the majority of the Portuguese, but they are my ancestors. Perhaps one day, we will no longer be able to coexist on Earth. The next generations will live in harsher conditions than we do. Until now, despite wars, epidemics, etc., there was a kind of legitimate hope that in every era, efforts and sacrifices aimed to allow the next generation to live better.
Doesn’t inventing the future on stage also mean questioning the power of theatre?
From the moment we ask what theatre can do, we open the door to what it must be. Above all, I believe that theatre is, as real as we breathe. No one decided the function of breathing! Theatre is part of the human adventure, like silence or the capacity to be moved by the flight of a bird. Its particularity is that once the performance is over, we quickly move from poetry to reality. This art form is partly political because it depends on a human assembly, a physical presence, a meeting, togetherness, the relationships between individuals and the city. Theatre opens the door to debate, to dialogue… because there is someone beside us. When we finish a book that has moved us, we remain alone, silent, facing the book. With theatre, we are immediately in motion, out on the street, with others. As if we all had question marks on our backs and were walking, helping the person next to us to walk with their own question mark.
To represent this father-daughter relationship and its link to the planets, you chose a specific set design…
To talk about an interplanetary relationship, through which we feel distance and absence, requires making tangible the ellipse of the planets, their movement, their circularity. The presence on stage of a precise device, in this case a revolving stage, a round platform that turns on itself, allows two worlds to be visible at once, Earth and Mars, with one actor on each side of the revolving stage. This scenography expresses their solitude: the moment the character has their back turned, no longer seeing the other, they can still continue to communicate. We then experience this state of separation and loneliness. Likewise, we can see both actors in the same space, if only for a moment, while they revolve! The speed of the revolving stage creates the possibility of a metric in the writing, a rhythm in the speech, and therefore the "amount of words" that will be spoken at that moment! This allows us to explore the time lag in communication between Earth and Mars as well as to create a theatrical form.
To explore this father-daughter relationship, you chose Adama Diop and Alison Dechamps…
Writing and staging such a play can plunge us into a certain anxiety. But doing it with an actor like Adama Diop is nonetheless a dream! I had the opportunity to work with him for the first time in 2021 in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, performed in the Cour d’Honneur for the Festival d’Avignon. He is an actor I have followed for a long time and admire. I have developed a bond of friendship and great artistic complicity with him. Any theatrical work must begin with a meeting between actors and an artistic team. Writing for someone is always writing with someone. I never write before casting a play, and rarely before rehearsals begin—even if I may have structures and ideas in mind. I write in the morning for the afternoon’s rehearsal. Writing is the result of a debate in my brain as well as in the body and mind of the actors. Adama Diop and I share many concerns, including a worry for the future. Also, the relationship to distance: we are both “non-French,” working in France and no longer living in our native countries. We have children and want to pass on something to new generations. Adama Diop has just opened the National School of Actors in Dakar. As for me, I have taught a lot and am always on the lookout for young artists. This is how I met Alison Dechamps, a young actress recently graduated from the school of the Théâtre national de Bretagne in Rennes. The play owes much to the ideas of Adama and Alison, to the fact that these ideas are imbued with their presence.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet in February 2025