La distance

About the show

The fact that we both live and work in a different country is another shared circumstance that guides our conversations toward the topic of distance. When we began meeting to discuss this project, it was immediately clear to me that the terrain of our collaboration would be ripe for inventing a work that addressed the distance between a father and a daughter, an intimate and microscopic allegory of matters of monumental global urgency.

Writer and director’s note

I begin each project by trying to answer two questions at once. The first is: who do I want to work with? But it’s not just about work. Knowing that life is short, that time is precious, and that making theatre is an intensely social activity, where the professional and personal spheres overlap, the question takes on a different form: Who do I want to spend a significant part of my life with, working and sharing an experience that could prove transformative? The second question is: What issues do I feel the urgent need to address on stage? Here too, the question can have other meanings, because in the past I have tended to translate a kind of synthesis of my concerns as a citizen with my own private anxieties into a sense of artistic urgency. The question, then, is: What matters of intimate and political urgency do I feel the need to translate into theatre? The first challenge I set for myself at the genesis of each project is therefore to try to reconcile the answers to these two questions.

The first answer is Adama Diop. I worked with Adama for the first time in 2021, on the only production of a repertory play I have directed to date: Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. His Lopakhin—so complex, authentic and full of humanity—was fully deserving of the Best Actor award from the French Critics Association and moved audiences across many countries. My desire to work with Adama again stems from the wish to continue the collaboration we began three years ago, and to deepen an artistic bond grounded in a shared understanding of both the responsibility and the freedom of the actor on stage. Bringing together a team of regular collaborators in lighting, sound, set and costume design around Adama’s artistic presence forms a key starting point for this project. The second answer is made up of several fragmentary responses, coming together in a thematic and poetic labyrinth. I’m interested in exploring the distance that can grow between a father and a daughter — not only as a specific subject, but also as a metaphor for a generational conflict that, in the context of the current climate crisis, may at times be expressed as an existential one.

I want to talk about the idea that humanity has reached a point in its history where we can no longer expect future generations to have a better life than those who came before, an aspiration that has been the basis of social and political organisations for centuries. I need to ask how large the generation gap will be in a dystopian, but increasingly realistic, future, an era of resource struggle and environmental catastrophe. I want to understand whether the young people of today and the future will see the world (or worlds) so differently from us and our ancestors that they will find it difficult to understand us. I’m also interested in projecting a narrative into a relatively distant future, fifty years from now, as a way of interrogating which path humanity might take if we were to colonise Mars. How will the colonists be selected? What will life look like on Mars—and on Earth? What does it mean to belong to a species spread across two planets? How will familial, social and private behaviours shift under the weight of such a project of spatial diaspora? One of the recurring themes in my conversations with Adama since we first met has been theatrical training, shaped by our shared concern for the paths that young artists are taking. And beyond that, both of us are fathers, and we are deeply interested in how our sons and daughters see the world.

The fact that we both live and work in a different country is another shared circumstance that guides our conversations toward the topic of distance. When we began meeting to discuss this project, it was immediately clear to me that the terrain of our collaboration would be ripe for inventing a work that addressed the distance between a father and a daughter, an intimate and microscopic allegory of matters of monumental global urgency.

Tiago Rodrigues