Tiago Rodrigues brings La Distance to the Young Vic from 22 January to 13 February 2027, in French with surtitles, with Alison Dechamps and Adama Diop.
It is 2077. The climate has done what it was going to do, the economy has followed, and part of the population now lives in exile on Mars. A father on Earth is trying to keep a relationship going with a daughter who left. That is the entire apparatus of La Distance: two people, a delay on the line, and everything a parent and a child fail to say to each other made literal by the speed of light. Tiago Rodrigues wrote and directs it, and it premiered at Avignon, the festival he runs.
He is in London twice this season, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists having been at the National in September, and the two plays are the same instinct pointed in opposite directions: one at a family that has agreed on something monstrous, this at a family that can no longer hear each other at all.
It plays the Main House from Friday 22 January to Saturday 13 February 2027, in French with English surtitles, with Alison Dechamps and Adama Diop from the original cast. It lands a fortnight after Eurotrash closes, in the quietest stretch of the London year — which is when the theatre puts on the thing it is least worried about selling. Daniel Hahn wrote the English surtitles. Three weeks, and then it goes back to Europe.