What if Charles Darwin had published his seminal essay today rather than in 1859? This is what Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard imagined for his new creation tinged with black humor, you are animal. In this uchronic world, the defender of the theory of natural selection quickly finds himself at the center of an intense media controversy, criticized or taken over by all ideological sides. Attacked personally, is the scientist ready to become a public enemy to defend his ideas?
While reading On the origin of species for his previous play, ass slicer, the playwright had tried to understand how Darwin ended up being twisted – attributing to him the notion of survival of the fittest, when he spoke of the fittest – to advance causes having nothing to do with him. “It’s interesting to see how subtleties get lost when an idea becomes mainstream and that it is part of popular culture, he says. And it becomes so established that no one questions these concepts. When information is misunderstood, when we lose control over its message, rectification becomes “really difficult”. And even if he is the victim of erroneous interpretations, we “still hold the original author responsible”, adds Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.
Misinformation is not a phenomenon unique to today. “Historically, each new technology that has made it possible to transmit information has also been a new way of disseminating propaganda and bad news,” he recalls. What differs most is the speed and scale at which it is spreading in our globalized culture.
If he calls into question our lack of journalistic “literacy”, where we hardly make any distinction between information and opinion, the biting author of wildlife handbook above all does not want to make a reductive criticism of the media. By collaborating on it himself, the columnist acquired “great respect for journalistic work”. “But as an artist, I am aware of the deal what I have to do with the media: sometimes agree to sum up a work of two or three years and find out how it goes well in a 10-minute radio interview or in an article. This game is very dangerous. And I found that, to talk about this pact, science was a better entry point. The work that scientists have to do is even more difficult, because the material they have to transmit is even less digestible, in a very restricted space. I admire those who manage to do it well. »
Real effects
Directed by Patrice Dubois, resulting from an “extraordinary” collaboration, said the author, with the members of L’Ensemble, the permanent group of artists at the Théâtre PÀP, you are animal summons in its story a wide range of media figures, inspired by well-known personalities. Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard will himself be on the Quat’Sous stage to play a character bearing his name, who, preparing a documentary work on the scandal triggered by Darwin’s essay, tries to reconstruct the true story. This mixture of reality and fiction in the play highlights the confusion between truth and falsehood in which we are immersed. “Reality effects also help me make the story even more believable. This highlights the twists I make to reality and creates comic effects. »
In our way of apprehending the world, everything now must be justified by science
When starting to write his play, the author had in mind a parallel between his characters denying the theory of evolution and our contemporaries who refute climate change. But the deniers of scientific evidence have taken on another face for him since the pandemic. “It’s special how much science has lost ground in the last few years. »
The playwright observes on the other hand that “in our way of apprehending the world, everything now must be justified by science: the way we train, how we eat… So much so that we tend to look at each discovery in seeking immediate use. It puts a lot of pressure on the scientists. Also, during the pandemic, science has not been forgiven much for evolving live before our eyes. Suddenly, we saw preliminary data, because there was a certain urgency. Seeing scientists disagreeing, coming to opposite conclusions, I think for many people, it created a kind of cognitive dissonance that was hard to digest. We want certainty. So because of greater transparency in the communication of science, some people have less confidence in it, paradoxically”.