Déjà vu

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Two strangers — a man and a woman who seem to have never met — encounter each other on the terrace of a luxury Swiss hotel, each awaiting their own scheduled assisted suicide the next morning. What begins as a hesitant flirtation quickly takes an unexpected turn. In the second scene, both characters are propelled into a parallel, dystopian world: they reappear inside the modest living room of an outdated, utterly ordinary couple they are apparently meant to replace.
What remains of love, of identity, of self — when memory has been erased?

Date of writing2022

Number of characters4

Cast2 men, 2 women

Stage setScene 1: The terrace of a luxury hotel — garden table, two chairs, mountains in the distance. Scene 2: A modest apartment interior — living room with sofa, table, doors to kitchen and bedroom, and on the floor, a mysterious cardboard box.

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Analyses of the Play Déjà vu

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Genre Overview

Déjà vu exemplifies intimate symbolist comedy — a theatre where seemingly simple situations conceal metaphysical questions about existence and identity. Humour acts not as escape, but as a counterweight to the tragic dimensions of uncertainty, fragmentation, and the search for meaning.

The play blends several registers with subtlety. It borrows the lively exchanges of couple comedy, infuses them with the fantastical logic of the theatre of the absurd, and gradually pushes the action into an unsettling dystopian space. The appearance of doubles, the fluidity between realities, and the instability of perception turn the narrative into an existential vertigo. As identities blur, replicate, or collapse, laughter acquires a strange echo — one that resonates with anxiety rather than dispels it.

This hybrid form creates a unique atmosphere: playful, disquieting, and profoundly human.

Genres: Existential comedy, Fantastic comedy, Theatre of the absurd, Dystopian comedy

Thematic Panorama

At its core, Déjà vu examines identity:
What makes us who we are when our actions, our words, even our appearance can be reproduced by someone else?

Memory — erased, fragmented, or reinvented — becomes shifting terrain on which characters lose themselves and rebuild themselves.

The motif of the double reflects contemporary anxieties:

  • the fear of being replaced (by another person, by a machine, by a “better” version of oneself),

  • the fragility of the couple,

  • the impossibility of holding on to a stable sense of self in a world of repetition and erasure.

The play also expands toward metaphysical questions — parallel worlds, rewritten destinies, infinite loops — always approached with a delicate, ironic humour.

Dramaturgical Context

Jean-Pierre Martinez constructs the play around a gradual slide from realism to speculative dystopia.
The opening scene, set in an impersonal luxury hotel, works as an existential antechamber: the characters, missing part of their memory, hover between seduction, mistrust, and the intuition of an irretrievable past. Language tries to rebuild what consciousness can no longer grasp.

In the second scene, these same characters reappear in a banal apartment — a deceptive realism that soon dissolves. The arrival of doubles emerging from a cardboard box introduces an atmosphere of uncanny contamination: everyday life cracks open, revealing what the first scene only hinted at.

The dramaturgy follows a logic of amplification:
the doubles multiply, identities unravel, and the protagonists gradually lose possession of themselves. The apartment becomes a distorted mirror where both couples watch each other, replace each other, and eventually trade places.

This aesthetic of duplication situates Déjà vu within Martinez’s body of work as a dystopian comedy where humour barely conceals the vertiginous fragility of reality.

Character Types: Couple, clones, doubles, mirror figures, fragmented identities, threatening alter egos.

Temporal Framework: Unstable present, fractured timeline, looped temporality, interdimensional slippage.

Motifs: Duplication, cardboard box, substitution, identity reconstruction, memory loss, emergence of the double.

Indexing Related to the Play Déjà vu

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Copyright

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