Vincent Hennebicq: The question of a line between fiction and reality has always been at the forefront when I construct my shows. We live in such an absurd world that reality is often stranger than fiction – which itself seems to filter into reality.

In L’Attentat, the path from fiction to reality was swiftly established. First by working with an actor of Palestinian origin, Atta Nasser, who guided us through the places described in the novel; and then by approaching Israelis and Palestinians directly to ask them what they would have to say, what they would like to see if they were part of the fiction, they who live this reality on a daily basis.

Their responses are often so compelling, so well-constructed, that many people think they are written and therefore fictional testimonies, but they are words uttered off the cuff, spontaneous interviews.

In the case of Propaganda ! I have often been asked how real the show is because of the sheer cynicism of Edward Bernays’ views. His journey through the 20th century and construction of a consumer society are mind-boggling, yet nothing was invented; everything, again, is true.

I find it so fascinating, and I love works of art that combine fiction and reality; the lines are already so blurred in our daily lives.

Matthias Bruggmann: The question for me came, perhaps, from the opposite direction. Until very recently, photography was thought to be a kind of a true copy of reality. This is, of course, a mistake. A brief glance at history is enough to show us why. Can we really believe that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead to appear beside his widow in a photograph? Can we reasonably assume that the spirit photographs of the second half of the 19th century are the result of a historical reality?

The inherent technological nature of photography means that it is a reflection of modernity. It is both the child of modernity and, today, perhaps its most powerful driver (computer chips would not exist without photography).

Photography, particularly documentary photography, has rarely been addressed in the same way as literature has. Yet, a little like the non-fiction novel, photography can only exist in a liminal space, in a dialectic, not a dichotomy, between art and document, between reality and fiction. It is therefore not – or perhaps no longer – a question of simply distinguishing between reality and fiction, but rather of accompanying the spectator in distinguishing what is real in the fictional and what is fictional in the real. This enables us to understand the world created by Bernays and his ilk.

Rather than claiming that a photographic image is the work of the pencil of nature*, we should postulate that photography, like any language, can only be constructed.

Vincent Hennebicq: For me, what matters in stories, be they real or fictional, is the confrontation with the other, and therefore with oneself, the realisation that nothing is inhuman and arriving at a better understanding of our lives and our place in the world. Perhaps this need to give meaning to everything that happens around us is one of the reasons that leads us to enter a world of fiction like the theatre, hoping to find emotions, questions, sometimes answers, that will help us to better understand the world around us and to feel less alone.

* The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot (London, 1844) was the first book of photography to be published.

— Comments made by e-mail, November 2019