An example of a show that can be performed without the need for the artists to travel, Two Adults and a Child is a concept by Ant Hampton featuring three unrehearsed performers from Lausanne, different each night. They follow the directions given to them by a group of absent children. The kids' whispered voices convey their dreams and their anger at a world in which they do not recognise themselves... A group of self-professed abandoned children, as mischievous as they are apparently outraged, have recorded a kind of script for a show that remains untested due to an adult world unable to engage with them. Thanks to a fully automated "theatre machine" of their own design, the children, from another space and time, are able to guide two adults as well as a local child, their "living associate”.

This child seems to be in control - observing, commenting, arranging the files… But in fact, (s)he receives instructions via headphones hidden under a hoodie. None of the three performers are rehearsed. Behind the audience is a video of children doing a kind of dance: the adults on stage, copying these movements, become puppets, illustrating the stories and thoughts whispered by the recorded voices. These absent children share their thoughts and determination. They are like the muffled hum of a part of the world's inhabitants – especially its children – who refuse to accept the way society is turning out. The hum grows louder.

Ant Hampton's fiction is a patchwork of inspirations including the Fridays for Future demonstrations and Marguerite Duras' Summer Rain, in which young Ernesto is a gifted child who refuses to conform to the depressing confines of his family and school, and invents for himself a vast community of imaginary siblings. The spectacle of screen-entranced adults "manipulated" by children speaks of the hope of a coming world driven by the energy of refusal, but which certainly does not exclude cunning, playfulness and mischief...