What if Molière had lived beyond 1673 and written a brand new comedy with the help of generative AI? L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages imagines that missing play through a large scale collaboration between Obvious and Sorbonne University.
Set in seventeenth century Paris, the play follows Géronte, a wealthy bourgeois who lets a fraud astrologer, Pseudoramus, steer every decision through fabricated horoscopes. When he arranges for his daughter Lucile to marry an ageing wigmaker she does not love, her secret lover Cléonte and the quick witted maid Dorine set out to expose the scam and reclaim her future. Developed within the Molière Ex Machina project, the production uses AI models trained on Molière’s works to generate scenes, dialogue, music and visual concepts, which are then critically edited by scholars and artists to stay faithful to both theatre history and today’s digital anxieties.
