It starts dry, brutal. Two boys meet a girl who is waiting for her girlfriend. They are 13 years old, hardly more given their small size. She is bigger. The attack is immediate. Verbal and so tense that we immediately fear the rest. Insults, physical threats. Pure hatred, terror also on the boys’ side. Is this girl a robot or a real one?
On the black set of threats of the Comédie de Genève, the French director Joël Pommerat projects us into the very near future. Unless it is already our present, twisted, dystopian and scary. Here, robots live among us. They have arms, legs, clothes, a good face and they talk. It is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) who help the children with their homework and serve as their babysitter or confidant. In any case among families who can afford their services because they still cost candy, these AIs sold in stores like cars or household appliances.
“Tales and legends” by Joël Pommerat at the Comédie de Genève. [Elisabeth Carecchio – Comédie de Genève]
Robots, these unique beings
Next scene, softer, and yet no less uncomfortable. Here we are in a home, with a teenager happy with the company of his friend Robi. “We must no longer call them robots. They are unique beings, with a real personality”.
Really? The identity of robots is built through self-learning and interaction with their human partners. That of adolescents involves socialization and the discovery of their changing bodies. Socializing with whom? This lover with whom the relationship is so complicated or this AI on whom we can always count and who seems to understand us perfectly? And what regarding masculinity and femininity in this world that mixes the human and the artificial? Finally, what regarding parents: what use are they since they can be physically and even emotionally replaced by AI?
Cinderella’s world
“Tales and legends”, funny title for this show where we laugh so often. It makes us dangle the world of Cinderella to better immerse us in a hell of a mess of ethical and philosophical questions. What are our borders and our share of humanity? To better muddy the waters, on the kids and AI side, the cast of this show is all-female. Likewise, the voices have a sound treatment that makes them unreal.
Robots, girls and boys are thus navigating in troubled waters, crossing as best they can a fog and a blur that are familiar to those who live in the present this evolution-revolution that is the passage from childhood to adulthood. . In comparison, adults evolve in a world before that seems antediluvian.
Show of rare intelligence
With its militias of boys who “act with their balls”, these robots so nice that we must nevertheless leave because we must “become independent from now on”, these overwhelmed parents who are considering the replacement of a mother at the end of her life by a robot or this cancerous kid who holds on thanks to his devotion to an artificial superstar, “Tales and legends” shakes up and reveals itself to be of rare intelligence while remaining a perfectly accessible spectacle. It’s quite simple, it should be included in the compulsory curriculum for schools… and parents.
Thierry Sartoretti/mh
“Tales and legends” by Joël Pommerat, Comédie de Genève, until March 18.
