"By humanising androids and robotising humans, we wanted to create a new generation of humans"

What attracted you to Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata’s adaptation of Chekhov’s *The Three Sisters*? 

A play that speaks of tomorrow based on a text from yesterday

A science fiction enthusiast since childhood, having read authors such as Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and, later, Ursula Le Guin, I have always loved immersing myself in utopias because they offer a reinvention of the world. For me, that is the strength of science fiction stories: they offer alternative worlds and alternative political and social structures. Like a distorting mirror, these tales of the future dissect our dysfunctions and allow us to imagine all manner of utopias. They are, by their very nature, eminently political and innovative. 

Secondly, I’ve been a huge fan of Chekhov for a long time and I’ve always told myself that I wanted to stage one of his plays one day. 
It so happens that Hirata’s work is remarkable because he does not merely transpose it to the present day. He reinvents it from the present, building on the foundations of a past narrative, to imagine a future that confronts us. 

Not only does Hirata brilliantly unravel Chekhovian motifs, but he weaves them back together to deliver a unique and innovative narrative. The distance he establishes from his model reminds me of the distance separating the model from his android avatar in the author’s play. Through an offbeat hyperrealism, the aim of which, he says, “is not to transcribe reality, but rather to transcribe it with a shift of 5 or 10 centimetres”, Hirata quietly creates a sense of profound upheaval. In the same way, the human model and her android avatar, even though they are created from the same template, will forever remain different from one another. 

A theatre of silence and the beyond 

“Any being that has the appearance of life without actually having life calls upon extraordinary powers. Is it because they cannot die? They are the dead who seem to speak to us…” Maeterlinck 

Formally, the Japanese author reinvents a new way of making the stage a mirror of life. He explores, with feigned simplicity, the silent upheavals of existence in all its tragically everyday aspects. In the manner of Maeterlinck, Hirata shows us what is astonishing about the very fact of living, through a very slight shift that I explore with passion on stage. 
He deconstructs the dialogue with the precision of a lace-maker (every silence, every overlap of words or gestures is written with scalpel-like precision). Thought stutters, searches for itself, fails to express the essential. And everything that needs to be heard is to be found between the words, in the pauses, the silences and the stumbles. The dialogues are subtly unrealistic and yet brimming with the everyday, with onomatopoeia, even with the rumbling of the stomach; they repeat, vary, become clearer, and are refined, as if seeking the right path to a successful dialogue. 

Showing life through the absence of life

Paradoxically, it is from the androids—these ‘programmed’ and (apparently?) unconscious beings—that the only free speech will emerge, in a world where the characters, as in Chekhov, lie to themselves. 
These artificial beings, untouched by death, are strangely moving in their vitality and naivety. They remind us of our appalling capacity for forgetting, we humans, sometimes going so far as to deny ourselves and our values, to repress our dreams and hopes. 
The androids, however, forget nothing; they keep their childhood dreams intact. They do not die. They do not eat. And they never lie.
From childhood, they also inherit this ability to speak the truth, which allows them to constantly challenge all our social conventions. 

What are the major themes running through the play? 

Our relationship with death, which we find increasingly difficult to accept.
Our will to power, which leads us to want to control life and to reject illness and death ever more. 

Transhumanism and the virtualisation of our relationship with the real world. 

The power of denial and secrecy, which lead to the loss of all sisterhood.
The strength of secrets in the face of the desire for truth and reconciliation. 

The family, and the generational conflicts that have become incapable of truly understanding one another. 

The slow and inexorable decline of a society with its ageing codes and traditions.
The bug as a catalyst for change. 

The inanimate serving the living, as the last resort of a humanity losing its values. 

The androids are played by actor-dancers; tell us about working with them and the choreographer Ikue Nakagawa. 

We sought to understand what an AI would seek to imitate in a human, how it would view us, our way of moving, speaking and interacting. 
For this reason, we worked on principles of imitation and reflection, each offering a revealing mirror image that functions as a mutual realisation. By humanising the androids and robotising the humans, we sought to create a sort of new generation of humans.
We essentially worked to create stage images that act as revelations of the spoken word or the situation being experienced. These are a sort of half-awake, half-real reverie, like quantum realities that echo, or collide depending on the moment, with what is being said on stage. Unheimlich moments, sequences of an unsettling strangeness that offer as much a space for distortion as a space to breathe.

What were your sources of inspiration for this show? 

What inspired me were all my sci-fi readings, from comics to novels, including films and series.
But it’s true that it’s mainly visual worlds that have stayed with me and which shine through in our approach: Blade Runner, 2001, Her, Poor Things, Canines, Moon, Dune, Ex Machina, and of course the series Severance, Real Humans, Westworld, Raised by Wolves, Black Mirror,… 

This year, your company – Entre chiens et loups – is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Is there a common thread running through all the productions in your repertoire? 

I think a common thread running through the latest works would be the toxic relationship we have with death, our refusal to look at it and to care for it. From there comes the desire to work on healing and resilience as weapons of resistance. 
I would say that through my work, I seek to challenge my peers, to understand and to create a space for dialogue and healing. I seek to examine humanity in all its contradictions, its dreams—whether unfulfilled or realised. The living in their unfathomable opacity, in the grey areas of their consciousness and morality. 

A freeze-frame amidst the general commotion. A close-up of our inner selves. 

I want to make the individual’s heart heard, beating amidst the hubbub of the crowds. Their secrets, their doubts, their forgotten dreams, their unspoken pains, their fleeting joys, their epiphanies, their stolen ecstasies. How they honour their departed loved ones and their memory. What place they give them amidst the great commotion. How they pass by other hearts without hearing them. How they go through life without seeing it. 

Through storytelling and sharing,
reconnecting, questioning, healing.

• 11–22 March 2025
• THE THREE SISTERS (ANDROID VERSION)
• Oriza Hirata, Jasmina Douieb / Entre Chiens et Loups