Tiago Rodrigues imagines a father and a Mars-exiled daughter losing each other across a speed-of-light delay, at the Young Vic in French with surtitles.
Tiago Rodrigues’s La Distance, about a father on Earth and a daughter who has left for Mars, opens at the Young Vic in Waterloo on Friday 22 January 2027. It plays in French with English surtitles until Saturday 13 February.
The play is set in 2077. As the planet buckles under environmental collapse, part of humanity has resettled on Mars, chasing a new beginning.
The play is two people and a delay on the line. What a parent and a child fail to say to each other is made literal by the speed of light.
Rodrigues wrote and directs it, and has said: “We no longer believe it’s possible to change the world. We believe that we need to change worlds.” It premiered at the Festival d’Avignon, which he runs.
He is in London twice this season. His Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists played the National in September, a play about a family that has agreed on something monstrous.
Alison Dechamps and Adama Diop come from the original cast to the Main House. Daniel Hahn wrote the surtitles, and the production returns to Europe after the run.