With Déjà vu, the theatre ventures into a space where intimacy is no longer merely psychological, but becomes a field of symbolic resonance. The starting point seems realistic, if unusual: a man and a woman who appear not to know each other meet in a luxury hotel on the eve of their respective assisted suicides, and engage in a hesitant, almost tender flirtation. But from the second scene onward, both characters — and the audience with them — are thrust into a clearly dystopian parallel world.
In Déjà vu, events resemble things already lived, words echo phrases once spoken, and gestures look as though borrowed from an earlier scene. This stacking of the familiar and the strange is characteristic of intimate symbolist comedy, where the everyday becomes the raw material for a metaphysical inquiry into identity, time, space and memory.
1 – Semiotic analysis of the Play Déjà vu
The narrative is built on a paradox: the characters try to clarify what they are experiencing, yet each attempt only deepens the sensation that they have lived it all before. The plot does not progress through twists or revelations but through returns, shifts and recurrences. It is less a detective story than an existential quest. The play explores how our most intimate relationships are shaped by patterns so deeply rooted in the collective unconscious that they feel pre-experienced.
Comedy arises from this subtly off-key repetition, from the confusion between present moment and remembered moment — the very essence of the “déjà vu” sensation. Laughter emerges when the audience realises that intimate experience is never entirely new, and constantly reenacts what it believes it is discovering for the first time.
The enunciation heightens this sense of mise en abyme. The dialogue, simple and pared down, functions like an echo chamber: a line answers one that seemed to anticipate it; an emotion appears before it is justified; an image returns like a discreet refrain. The stage becomes a space of resonances rather than actions, a place where symbolic depth grows through the weaving of voices and silences. Nothing is spectacular: the writing favours subtlety, suggestion and vibration over explicit demonstration. Even the set emphasises this doubling effect — a familiar space whose exaggerated conventionality makes it feel slightly unreal, as though the world itself were a reflection of itself.
The connotative dimension draws the play toward a universal question: what do we do with our past? How do intimate relationships reinvent themselves — or repeat themselves — despite us? Déjà vu humorously explores the difficulty of being oneself in a world one thinks one recognises, the temptation to hide within one’s own narratives, or conversely, the desire to escape them. The laughter becomes almost metaphysical, tinged with melancholy: it questions our inability to grasp what is truly singular in the present moment, and what is merely the faint echo of an eternal return.
Déjà vu thus fully embodies the intimate symbolist comedy, where the apparent simplicity of situations hides a metaphysical meditation on the meaning of existence and the very nature of identity, with comedy defusing — though never denying — the tragic dimension of this impossible search for meaning.
2 – Dramaturgical Analysis
Déjà vu unfolds through a two-phase dramaturgical shift: an opening tableau built as a soft-spoken, almost elegant huis clos, where the characters hover between lucidity and amnesia; followed by a second tableau that introduces a radical rupture, pushing realism into a fantastical and dystopian dimension. The transition from palace to apartment marks a shift from psychological uncertainty to ontological disturbance: the characters no longer question only their memory, but their very existence.
The play belongs to a tradition of metaphysical comedy where surface lightness masks profound unease: the possibility that identity may be interchangeable, reproducible — or worse, replaceable. By multiplying doubles, Martinez turns the stage into a laboratory in which variations on selfhood, couplehood and the continuity of reality are explored.
Characterisation
First tableau
At first, the situation resembles a realistic flirtation between a man and a woman — except that their identities flicker. They seem to recognise one another without certainty, as if replaying a scene already lived. Their exchanges outline incomplete personalities marked by forgetting.
Second tableau
Here, they become the doubles of an ordinary couple, posing both a physical and symbolic threat. As near-perfect replicas — sometimes more confident, more agile, more “adjusted” — each double becomes an alternative version of the original, revealing that original’s fragilities.
In this way, the character system functions as a hall of mirrors, where each figure reflects the other’s vertigo of identity.
Scope and Significance
Déjà vu interrogates our contemporary relationship to identity in a world dominated by duplication, simulation and self-referential loops: social media personas, digital avatars, optimised versions of the self. By embodying the double on stage, the play gives form to the deep unease of an era obsessed with constant improvement and infinite replication.
It also questions the couple as a fragile space where the image the other has of us shapes our own self-perception. What remains of the bond if a more effective copy can take our place?
Finally, the play offers a metaphysical reflection: Is existence unique or replicable?Is the “self” a stable construct, or a fragile illusion that can split — and vanish?
Blending humour and vertigo, Déjà vu offers a subtle comedy about the dissolution of the subject and the permeability of reality.
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