When Humans and Humanoids Land on a Dystopian Southbank: a Q&A With the Director of 'The Employees'

Picture this: a world where humans and human-like humanoids coexist as employees on an interplanetary odyssey, grappling with the quintessence of consciousness, love, life, and death. Łukasz Twarkowski’s stage adaptation of the Olga Ravn novel The Employees illuminates an evening of post-apocalyptic philosophical musings, dark satire, and fundamental questions about humanity's ontology. Ahead of its London premiere at the Southbank Centre, I sat down with award-winning director Łukasz Twarkowski about his spin on this sci-fic epic set aboard the 6000 Spaceship.

The company of The Employees. Photo Credit: Natalia Kabanow

STRAND: Could you start with a little bit about you and how you came to be a director?  

Łukasz Twarkowski: This is kind of a long story! First of all, I have never, ever, finished any directing studies, and I think that this helped me a lot. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do theatre from a very, very early age.

But in the beginning, I didn’t know there was a director doing a show, and I believed that actors were doing what they wanted on stage, so I wanted to be an actor. But then at some point, at the age of 13, I discovered that directors exist, and since then I have known that it was what I wanted to do.

Meanwhile, I got completely passionate about media art, because we have – in my home city – quite a big biennale of media art. That’s where I started to get fascinated by the possibilities of storytelling and strategies based on new media and media in general.

The company of The Employees. Photo Credit: Natalia Kabanow

What about Olga Ravn’s novel, The Employees, made you want to make it into a theatre production?

It’s a pretty unique project, because we do not usually work on texts. Very few productions started from text and were inspired by text. When a dramaturg told me briefly the story, I thought in the beginning that I'm absolutely not interested in the topic, because it's a topic that I had been digging into 10 years before. I felt like it was not really interesting for me, because it became really mainstream. It’s not the moment to go back to the same things.

When I read [The Employees], I understood that this may be kind of the same theme, but it is told from such a different angle, and it's so fascinating what Olga has done. First, the form of her novel is rather anti-novel; she was asked to write a curatorial text for an exhibition of sculptures [by Danish artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund], and she was trying to write something but didn’t know how to do it, so she started to write some short notes and statements. She didn’t think that it could work. [Hestelund] read it, and she said that it's amazing, and [Ravn] started to write more, and she was doing new sculptures, and that's how they continued working.

On the opening night, these leaflets of statements were just thrown all around the space and could be read in random order. After that, [Ravn] put it all together, and she got nominated for the Booker Prize.

The company of The Employees. Photo Credit: Natalia Kabanow

This is the thing about this book that it doesn't have any story inside. It doesn't have any characters inside. You have no idea how many there are; you have just a collection of statements. But what was the most interesting for me was that you would be never sure. With more than half of them, you cannot be 100% sure, if it's human or humanoid speaking.

And this strategy was something extremely interesting for us, thinking about the moment when humans and humanoids will become indistinguishable.

We really thought about what makes our human uniqueness – and with humanoid beings, what is artificially created, and what experiences can be recreated? The two things that are the most important in the novel are death and love, which are so much human.

I thought about how to find a visual representation of what humanoid life would be, and that’s how I decided to dual-role the actors. Each actor is playing a human and a humanoid at the same time, and the humanoid is the creature which is made on the basis of the biomaterial of a human and looks absolutely the same.

You talk about the mirroring between the two characters, and having the same actor play the human and the humanoid. How do you think that aids the key idea of the intersection between humans and technology, facing fundamental questions about human existence and technological existence?

What Olga wrote is not so much technology-based; she’s not really asking questions about technology. She is, at the bottom of her heart, a poet. This book is poetic, in a very very good sense, because it’s very minimalist but poetic at the same time. The human experience is the most beautiful thing – as her motto writes: “my consciousness is like a hand; it touches instead of thinking".

She gets to the human experience through the senses and through the most basic, most primitive experiences that we stopped paying attention to. But the humanoid, which is reaching a level of self-consciousness, starts to question the most basic things that we are feeling but already forgot. It gives some kind of beautiful angle to see the complexity of our being and the complexity of our everyday experiences, which are so full of beautiful things that we completely forget about.

The company of The Employees. Photo Credit: Natalia Kabanow

You said that you’ve put The Employees on in a few different countries. How do you think putting it on in London will go? Why the Southbank Centre? How do you think the setting of this city will go?

I really have no idea! I cannot wait to see, because I have no idea what to expect. It’s impossible to judge or predict based only on city or country, because it depends so much on the audience. The reactions can be completely different. The performance, first of all, is made for the audience to walk around throughout – you can change the perspective, you can lie down, you can walk out, you can come back. That’s what we ask of our audiences in the beginning. There are three-minute breaks for them to change their perspectives.

In Warsaw, where we had the premiere, it was on a classical Italian stage theatre. So from the beginning, it was made on the main stage with some extra platforms around, but we took away half of the seats to make a big empty space. In the Southbank Centre, it will be this more classical style. The question is, will people move? Once you have your comfortable seat, will the audience be eager to leave them?

How do you intend to play with the multimedia use of the stage at the Southbank Centre?

It is a very small set, 6 by 6 square metres, which is a cube with four huge screens on the top and four smaller screens under the big screens. Almost everything is happening inside this structure, so we are watching it from outside. The structure is almost like a really self-sufficient small box that we are watching – a magic box. The video montage is the same on all four sides of the box, but the perspective the audience has of the box can be altered if they move around.

The company of The Employees. Photo Credit: Natalia Kabanow

How have things gone with the other performances? How have audiences reacted in other cities?

It’s pretty different in each country, and obviously, you see a big difference between southern and northern countries, which are much more reserved. But it's not always true, because when we were playing in Hamburg and in Italy, there was a rather elderly audience, but there are a lot of electronic beats in the show, and it was so beautiful to see this elderly crowd of people – around their 60s – who were really having great fun and dancing crazily in the breaks. You saw these beautiful, old, ravish kinds of souls who were just ready to dance.

And sometimes you see very young audiences who come as if they are going to the opera on Sunday, and they're just sitting, not moving, being afraid to react in any way. So, apart from national differences, it pretty much depends on the place and what kind of audience this place has.

Is one of the goals to make the audience lose their inhibitions a little bit? You were saying everyone was kind of dancing in the breaks -- is that kind of the drive, to break the audience down in a way?

Because the performance itself is pretty static, there is not really much interaction – apart from the breaks when you can dance with actors – so it's a pretty closed form. We knew as well that this performance is like the mix of two narratives, because we did in 2020, this huge, huge rave performance, where really the audience is part of the events which are happening, and then you have to really deal with the actors [in a space of] more than 1000 square meters. You can just disconnect and go to dance. So out of this experience, in the case of this production, we're trying to combine, in a very delicate way, these two worlds.

The Employees plays at the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall from 16 January, 2025, to 19 January. This interview is lightly edited for length and clarity.