A comedy by Jean-Pierre Martinez
Translation by the author
In a future where assisted suicide has been replaced by voluntary recycling, a man and a woman, who met just before their reconditioning, reappear in the very ordinary home of the outdated couple they are meant to replace. Is there anything left of love when everything has been forgotten?
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The song from the play. Lyrics and music Jean-Pierre Martinez. This song may be used as part of a stage production, simple request to the author and without any additional fees. The audio file is available upon request, subject to prior authorization from the author for the use of the play’s text.
Is There Anything Left of Love… Once We Have Forgotten Everything?
On the eve of their “voluntary recycling”, a man and a woman meet in a Swiss hotel. He has chosen to die; she is terminally ill. Knowing they have no future left, they grow closer and decide to spend their final hours together. After being reconditioned, however, they reappear with no memories at all in the living room of an ageing couple whom they are destined to replace. Little by little, the newcomers learn how to live, take possession of the house and send its former occupants off to undergo the same recycling process.
The play is built around this two-part structure and a gradual reversal of positions. In the first part, the two characters know who they are but are about to lose their memories; in the second, they know nothing about themselves but gradually reconstruct an existence. At the same time, the established couple, initially in control of the house, become increasingly redundant in their own home before being declared “obsolete” and replaced. The language of computing and commerce — reconditioning, updating, old model — thus turns the cycle of life into an administrative procedure and reduces human beings to products that are replaced when they are no longer efficient enough.
Yet this dystopian mechanism leads to a more intimate question: what remains of us when our memories have disappeared? The reconditioned man and woman do not recognise each other, yet once again feel an inexplicable attraction. Even the whisky they still dislike, along with several other details, allows something of their previous encounter to surface without any conscious memory returning. The title Déjà vu then takes on its full meaning: the play suggests that identity may not be reducible to memory, and that love might survive as an inclination, a familiar sensation, a bond whose history has been forgotten. Their “second chance” thus brings the play full circle, back to the encounter with which it began.