Your creation lies at the border between a tale and a psychological thriller, and addresses end-of-life issues…
Tiphaine Raffier
This text, which I wrote and directed, takes the form of a closed-door drama. In a house located in an imaginary village, a woman named Laure brings together her brothers and sister. Suffering from cancer, she intends to spend her final days there. Around her, everyone tries to find a way to support her, to help her remain in control until the very end. Gradually, this upcoming death acts as a revealer: it exposes their flaws and fears. The audience witnesses their collapse in the face of the imminence of disappearance. In this tale, an entire imaginary of death unfolds, while a race against time begins. Time slips away. Power dynamics emerge: Who has the right to look, at what distance, and how? How can one look without judging? What is the difference between vigilance and attention?
Several literary works inspired you for this creation.
Yes, and the most important is La Fontaine des Lunatiques by André de Richaud. This author, who is somewhat forgotten today, blends romanticism and symbolism. I discovered his novel three or four years ago, and reading it left a deep impression on me. L’hors-présence borrows from André de Richaud the powerful metaphor of La Fontaine des Lunatiques.
You question the ways in which our Western society looks at death.
What interests me is how each character looks at Laure. And how each of them positions themselves in relation to the gradual shift in her condition. As the play progresses, Laure is no longer quite the same person from one scene to the next. Each character therefore has a different way of confronting this transformation, this chimera-like state. The onset of death forces us to constantly re-examine our relationship to beliefs, fears, and the bonds we maintain with vulnerability and loss.
The foundational work of Robert William Higgins—a psychoanalyst, consultant, and teacher in palliative care—has been a major source of inspiration for me. He theorised what he calls “the invention of the dying person”: the process by which our hypermodern societies create a separate category for the person who takes too long to die. To name them is already to set them apart, to exclude them from the world of the living even before they are dead. In the story I am telling, some people try to keep Laure on the side of the living, while others would like to help her die more quickly. It is in this gap, in this inability to agree on where Laure actually is, that something essential is at stake. For Higgins, this exclusion of the dying person is not malice. It is systemic. The product of a society that has learned to manage death rather than inhabit it.
But this “hors-présence” (“non-presence”), in the play, does not only concern the dying. There are also the dead who resurface and continue to occupy space with their presence. And then there are the living, all of whom are seeking the quality of their presence. How does one succeed in saying goodbye? In this way, L’hors-présence runs through all the characters.
This is the void I wanted to stage. Perhaps this is precisely where art can do something that neither medicine nor politics knows how to do: hold together these multiple presences, give them a shared space and a shared time. And learn to look at the void while trying to ask what it is: anxiety, a tunnel, a passage, mud or gold, depending on who is looking.
Your play seems particularly relevant today.
I don’t know whether, by the time these lines are read, the proposed law on assisted dying will have been definitively passed. At the time we are speaking, the bill has been voted on in its second reading in the National Assembly. It is due to be examined by the Senate in April, with adoption expected before the summer or at the start of the autumn session in September. When I began writing, the debates were still ongoing. The idea for this play was born out of anger. But as I learned more about the subject, through reading and listening, that anger became tempered by doubt, nuance, and questioning. L’hors-présence seeks to explore all perspectives. For my part, I am in favour of assisted dying, but I fully understand that it is a matter of debate given the complexity of each individual situation. And the complexity of end-of-life is precisely what this play is about. What cultural baggage do we carry on this subject? What are our representations of it? Western society holds a contradiction: it keeps death at a distance, conceals it because it fears it so deeply. It is within these tensions, within these multiple perspectives, that the play seeks to find its language.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse in February 2026