[I’ve recently posted several articles on Rick On Theater on the subject of computers or artificial intelligence and art: “Replicating Classic Art Works” (21 February 2026), for instance, is a report from PBS News Hour on using computer technology to examine and analyze paintings and even duplicate them; “AI Art” (26 February 2026) is a 60 Minutes segment on the use of computers to create art with AI.
[“Dreaming the Impossible at M.I.T.” by Philip Elmer-Dewitt in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” (4 October 2021), a Time magazine report, goes all the way back to 1987, almost the dawn of the modern computer age, to look at a then-new, pre-AI experimental computer program that let playwrights test scenes on screen without hiring actors and a stage. Much later, I reposted “Tilly Norwood, AI Actress” (13 October 2025), a collection of articles on a fictional, photorealistic, 100% AI-generated “actress” whose arrival caused controversy in the film industry.
[Now we can have a look at something in the offing that was at the center of the recent strikes against film and television producers by the Writers Guild of America (May-September 2023) and SAG-AFTRA (July-November 2023): scripts written by AI trained on the works of an accomplished writer—in this case world-famous but long-dead. (Could the next step be seeing such a script enacted by the sisters and brothers of Tilly Norwood?)
[Below, I’m reposting a New York Times article on a French experiment in which just such a “new” play was composed by AI in the style and language (literally) of Molière (1622-73), renowned French playwright. So far, after two years of work, only excerpts of the play, The Astrologer, have been performed. (When the full comedy is presented in May, maybe the reviews will be devised by writebots.)
[Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, was also an actor and director. Considered the master of comedy in Western literature, he revolutionized theater with satirical plays mocking human vices, vanity, and 17th-century French society, like Tartuffe (1664), a satire on religious hypocrisy, and The Misanthrope (1666), a study of a man who rejects the shallow conventions of society.
[Born to a wealthy Parisian upholsterer, he was expected to take over the family business but turned to theater, adopting the stage name Molière. He co-founded L’Illustre Théâtre (‘the illustrious theater’) in 1643, which initially went bankrupt, landing him in prison for debts. He spent 13 years touring provincial France, developing his craft before gaining patronage under King Louis XIV (1638-1715; King of France: 1643-1715; known as the Sun King [le Roi Soleil]).
[Molière was known for full-length comedies, farces, and comédie-ballets, including The School for Wives (L’École des femmes, 1662), The Miser (L’Avare, 1668), and The Bourgeois Gentleman (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 1670). He died in 1673 after collapsing during a performance of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire, 1673). (He finished the performance—he was playing Argan, the title role, a severe hypochondriac obsessed with illness and death—but died shortly afterwards at the age of 51.)
[His comedies often explored themes of hypocrisy, rigid social conventions, and medical absurdity. He specialized in creating memorable, exaggerated characters that highlighted human follies. His plays combined the slapstick of Italian Commedia dell’arte with profound social commentary.
[Molière’s influence is so pervasive that French is often referred to as “the language of Molière.” He’s credited with elevating comedy to a position of artistic honor equal to tragedy in French culture. The national theater award of France, recognizing achievement in French theater each year since 1987, are named Les Molières. The awards are considered the highest honors for stage productions and performances, equivalent to the U.S. Tony Awards or the British Olivier Awards.]
“CHALLENGING A.I.
TO MATCH
by Laura Cappelle
Scholars and artists
at Sorbonne
University worked on a program to imitate the French playwright, resulting
in a new production.
A tyrannical father, duped by a sham astrologer, promises his daughter in marriage — until she and a clever servant expose the fraud with some farcical tricks.
It sounds like a comedic plot by Molière, the 17th-century playwright who thrilled Paris by skewering paternal authority and pseudoscience. Yet the beloved French author didn’t write that one: It’s the scenario for “The Astrologer, or False Omens” [L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages], a play written by an artificial intelligence program trained to imitate Molière’s themes, structures and sense of humor.
For the past two years, the French A.I. collective Obvious has been developing the script with the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne, a theater company specializing in historical reconstructions of the 17th-century repertoire. As part of the digital arts festival Némo, an excerpt will be performed on Saturday at the Centquatre, a Paris arts center, before a full staging at the Royal Opera of Versailles in May.
[Obvious is a Paris-based artist collective formed in 2017 by childhood friends Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier to explore the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. They achieved global recognition in 2018 with the sale of their first major work, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, at Christie’s New York.
[Caselles-Dupré (b. 1993), as a specialized researcher in artificial intelligence and machine learning, is the technical lead and research director of Obvious; Fautrel (b. 1993) was educated in digital marketing and communication, before which, he was involved in the electronic music scene; Vernier (b. 1993) has a background in business and economics, providing the strategic and commercial foundation for the collective.
[Obvious served as the technical and creative engine behind "The Astrologer.” During the collaboration with Théâtre Molière Sorbonne for the project Molière Ex Machina, the collective utilized specialized AI models to reconstruct Molière's creative process. With Sorbonne scholars, they trained AI on Molière’s themes, linguistic structures, and humor to write the play’s dialogue. They used AI to generate sketches for historically informed costumes and stage sets that mimicked the aesthetic of the 17th-century French court and to compose music for the performance, ensuring it aligned with the period’s style.
[Also founded in 2017, the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne's mission is to revive the old-fashioned techniques of declamation and acting of the 17th century. A true school-workshop, it is aimed at the entire student community of Paris’s Sorbonne University, passionate about theater, singing, dance, or music and wishing to experiment with a new way of reproducing plays as they were performed in the time of Molière, Pierre Corneille (1606-84), and Jean Racine (1639-99). The Théâtre Molière Sorbonne performs at the Sorbonne as well as on prestigious stages in France.
[The arts center Centquatre, whose name is legally rendered as two words, Cent Quatre, but which was restyled as one in 2010 for graphical and marketing reasons, opened in 2008 in a former funeral hall. The center’s name means ‘one hundred four’ (which in French is properly two words—but the French language predates modern logotypy) and is derived from the former address of the building: 104 rue d’Aubervilliers (now 5 rue Curial).
[Centquatre-Paris, as it’s called (usually in all-caps), is a public facility that serves all forms of art, both creation and exhibition. It has large spaces for displays, exhibits, and performances; studio spaces for creating new work; workshop and rehearsal spaces for resident artists and groups; rooms for lectures and classes, plus restaurants and cafés as well as shops.]
The process was driven by “scientific curiosity,” Mickaël Bouffard, the director of the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne, said. “We’re trying to simulate Molière’s creative process, step by step. Our goal is to be as historically accurate as possible.”
The collaboration was masterminded by the sociologist Pierre-Marie Chauvin, a vice president of Sorbonne University, who said he saw in Obvious “a long-view approach to A.I., and a real interest in cultural heritage.”
The collective is best known for creating visual artworks with algorithms; in 2018, one of its paintings became the first A.I. work [Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018)] sold through the auction house Christie’s, for $432,500 [worth $560,000 in 2026]. Obvious opened its own research laboratory within Sorbonne University three years ago, and Chauvin brought its three members to see the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne.
Nobody in Obvious is a regular theatergoer: Its members’ experiences of Molière came primarily from their school days [all three are 32 or 33 now], they said in a group interview. Yet they immediately clicked with Georges Forestier, the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne’s founding director, whom Chauvin described as “extraordinarily curious and technophile.”
Forestier came up with the play’s main theme: human credulity, a fitting topic for an A.I.-written pastiche and one that Molière frequently touched on. Coraline Renaux, a Ph.D. student and a member of the theater company, then suggested an astrologer as a viable antihero. Astrologers are mentioned in some of Molière’s plays, and after his death, his collaborator Jean Donneau de Visé [1638-1710; French journalist, royal historian, playwright, and publicist] wrote a play about astrology, “The Comet.”
[The provenance of The Comet (La Comète, 1681) is messy and confusing, and I won’t try to recount all the theories of how it came to be written. I’ll relate the most accepted theory of its composition and let curious readers look up the variations and permutations.
[What is certain is that La Comète was written in 1680, to capitalize on the appearance of the Great Comet of 1680 (also called Kirch’s Comet, and Newton’s Comet), discovered by astrologer Gottfried Kirch (German; 1639-1710). The comet passed through the terrestrial heavens between 14 November 1680 and 19 March 1681. It caused quite a frisson in France (and all around the world) and there were many scientific and pseudo-scientific rumors and predictions on people’s lips and in their imaginations. (Kirch’s Comet has an orbital period of 10,000 years, so it shouldn’t be back here until sometime in the 117th century.)
[Most authoritative sources, including the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France), credit the play primarily to Donneau de Visé and a man named Bernard le Bouyer (or Bovier) de Fontenelle (1657-1757 – no, that’s not a typo; Fontenelle died at the age of 99), a French writer known for his interest in science and philosophy. Donneau de Visé likely provided the commercial instinct and dramatic structure, while Fontenelle contributed the intellectual debates on chance and astronomy found in the script.
[Fontenelle was the nephew of the brothers Pierre and Thomas Corneille (his morher, Marthe, was their sister), both dramatists of some renown. (Pierre Corneille, a tragedian; Molière, a comedian; and Racine, another tragedian, were the three great playwrights of 17th-century France.) Thomas Corrneille (1625-1709) was also Donneau de Visé’s most frequent playwriting collaborator at the time. The younger Corneille brother likely acted in an advisory or editorial capacity as part of the established writing triumvirate.
[With the names of Jean Donneay de Visé, a luminary of the company at the Hôtel Guénégaud (which later became the Comédie-Française), and Thomas Corneille, a star of the troupe at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, one of France’s most important theaters, connected to the project gave it theatrical heft and credibility, especially following the disastrous reception, one month earlier, of Fontenelle’s 17th-century historical tragedy Aspar. (It did the project no harm that Donneau de Visé was also the founder and director of Le Mercure galant, a popular and influential literary gazette where Thomas Corneille was an editor.)]
After Forestier died from cancer in 2024, Bouffard continued driving the project forward. It turned out to be an arduous process. [The] creative team experimented with different prompts and programs trained by Obvious on Molière’s body of work, and struggled with the A.I.’s tendency to forget the beginning of the play once the story progressed. After a few months, Bouffard was almost ready to give up, he said, “because it was so laborious.”
“It took Molière two weeks to write a play, whereas we’ve been at it for two years,” said Gauthier Vernier, an Obvious member.
The quick progress of A.I. models provided the consistency needed to sustain long-form writing. Along the way, a team of Molière scholars provided human feedback on the evolving synopsis — which has been revised 15 times — and on the script itself.
Among them is Lise Michel, an associate professor of French literature at Lausanne University [Université de Lausanne (University of Lausanne), Switzerland]. She said she approached reviewing the A.I. synopsis as “a game,” using her in-depth knowledge of Molière’s plays to identify anything that didn’t sound “quite right.”
Molière’s satirical humor, which blends literary wit and slapstick farce, proved especially hard to nail. The A.I. tended to excessively draw out humorous metaphors or make overly naïve jokes. Feedback from actors helped, according to Bouffard, who added that the A.I. also had “strokes of genius”: “We laughed so hard at times,” he said, “because we never thought it would be able to come up with some of these lines.”
Although the team was careful not to bill “The Astrologer” as a “new Molière play,” not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of the production. Bouffard said some colleagues had warned him that he was “taking on a sacred monster” in Molière.
In a recent Facebook post, Aurore Evain, a director and scholar who has revived forgotten plays by women, called the project a “Tartuffery” and criticized the $1.75 million budget attached to it (which came primarily from private French and North American sponsors, according to Sorbonne University).
[Obvioously derived from the name of the title character in Molière’s Tartuffe, the French word tartufferie (frequently tartuferie) means a ‘hypocritical act’ or the ‘act of a scoundrel.’ (This is the word that Evain used in her Facebook post. A tartufe/tartuffe—the word is both masculine and feminine—is a ‘hypocrite’ or a ‘scoundrel.’) The words both exist in English as well: ‘tartuffery’ means ‘religious hypocrisy’ and a ‘tartuffe’ is a ‘religious hypocrite.’]
The funding didn’t go solely to A.I.-powered writing: Three other models were trained to create historically accurate sets, costumes and music based on Molière’s collaborations with designers and composers. The resulting score and designs will be unveiled in full in Versailles in May before touring dates in France.
The show was conceived as a one-off, but the next step for A.I.-powered performing arts research may be to “complete unfinished plays or scores,” said Bouffard, who likened the idea to the restoration of a painting.
“A.I. has no ego, no taste — whether good or bad,” he said, stressing that this makes it more suited to pastiche than humans. “That sense of neutrality is really interesting,” he said. “It all depends on how we activate it.”
[Laura Cappelle is a Paris-based French journalist and scholar. In 2023, she was appointed associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She edited a French-language introduction to dance history, Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (“A new history of dance in the West”; Seuil, 2020), and her new book, Créer des ballets au XXIe siècle (“Creating ballets in the 21st century”), was published with CNRS Éditions in May 2024. She has been the Financial Times’ Paris-based dance critic since 2010, and the New York Times’ French theater critic since 2017. She is also an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine, published by the Centre national de la danse (CN D; National ance Center; Paris).
[Little is known about Molière Ex Machina aside from what’s reported in the Times article. The participants have been closed-mouthed about most aspects of the project; nothing that I could find was even published after the excerpts were performed at Centquatre.
[The plot synopsis put out by the project team is basically what the Laura Cappelle wrote: the play centers on a tyrannical father who is deceived by a fraudulent astrologer into marrying off his daughter, a theme chosen to reflect Molière’s frequent focus on human credulity.
[As Mickaël Bouffard says above, the production was conceived as a “scientific curiosity” to explore whether AI can match the wit and neutrality required for historical pastiche. There are some details about the creation of The Astrologer that aren’t covered in Cappella’s report. The “historically accurate” elements, for example, were created by training specific AI models on the work of Molière's 17th-century collaborators to ensure the production felt authentic to the year 1673.
[The costumes, for instance, were designed by an AI model trained on visual archives of Henri (de) Gissey (ca. 1621-73; French draughtsman and designer), the primary costume designer for the Cabinet of Louis XIV and a frequent collaborator of Molière. Although designed by AI, the costumes were hand-stitched and embroidered by human artisans using 17th-century techniques, materials, and patterns, with no modern shortcuts like zippers.
[The stage design follows the “historically informed” principles of the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne, which specializes in reconstructing 17th-century theatrical aesthetics. The AI was fed data from period engravings and stage directions from Molière’s time to generate sets that mimic the depth and style of the Palais-Royal or the Comédie-Française. Designs emphasize the perspective-heavy, painted-flat scenery typical of the Baroque era.
[The Théâtre Molière Sorbonne production aims to simulate a complete 17th-century sensory experience, so an AI model was trained on the works of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87; Italian-French composer, dancer, and instrumentalist; considered a master of the French Baroque music style), who composed the music for Molière’s famous comédie-ballets (like Le Bourgeois gentilhomme).
[Beyond the music, the actors were trained in period-accurate diction and gestures, ensuring that the AI-written text is delivered with the specific rhetorical style of the 1670s.
[Reactions to the AI’s imitation of Molière's style in The Astrologer have been a mix of scholarly fascination, practical challenges during the creative process, and sharp criticism from the theatrical community. Researchers found that the AI identified patterns in Molière’s work that were so "scattered" they had previously gone unnoticed by scholars, offering new insights into his structural craft.
[The media coverage has been reported as characterizing the work as a comedic plot that “skewers paternal authority and pseudoscience,” successfully imitating Molière’s specific structures and sense of humor—but, as I observed, I couldn’t find any outlets with published reception to confirm this.
[The sold-out excerpts were scheduled at the Centquatre on 10 January 2026 as part of the Némo digital arts festival (11 October 2025-11 January 2026). A full staging is planned for the Royal Opera of Versailles in May 2026.]
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