Company Collaborations: Double vie by Mateusz West
🗓️ Date: November 20, 2026 at 7:00 PM
📍Location: Progress Lab 1422, (1422 William St., Vancouver)
🎟️ FREE
Double vie
In English and French, fully surtitled.
Double Vie is supported by PTC’s Company Collaborations and Théâtre La Seizième‘s Artistic Incubator programs.
Double Vie is a bilingual, interdisciplinary performance featuring projections and artistically integrated surtitles. Drawing from 90s cyberpunk and sci-fi fan culture, it explores how fantasy, kink and language act as sites of rebirth.
A trans surgeon leads a reclusive, paranoid existence while seeking out BDSM roleplay online. When they are mailed a cassette tape by a Francophone femdom, they discover rêVelateur — a simulation where they can explore their most transgressive fantasies without ever leaving their room. In an increasingly isolated and fascist world, Double Vie follows characters who are revisioning themselves at the intersections of kink, transness and bilingualism.
Content warnings: depictions of anxiety, OCD and intergenerational trauma. Scenes of explicit, consensual sex featuring alternative practices including role-play, dominance and submission, impact play, needle play, degradation, and consensual non-consent.
Double vie
En anglais et en français, entièrement surtitré.
Double vie est soutenue par une collaboration avec PTC et l’Incubateur artistique du Théâtre La Seizième.
Double Vie est une performance bilingue et interdisciplinaire intégrant des projections et des surtitres de manière artistique. S’inspirant du cyberpunk et de la science-fiction des années 90, l’œuvre explore les façons dont le fantasme, le kink et la langue deviennent des plateformes pour la réinvention.
Un·e chirurgien·ne trans mène une existence recluse et paranoïaque tout en cherchant des jeux de rôle BDSM en ligne. Lorsqu’iel reçoit une cassette envoyée par une dominatrice francophone, iel découvre rêVelateur — une simulation lui permettant d’explorer ses fantasmes les plus transgressifs sans jamais quitter sa chambre. Dans un monde de plus en plus isolé et marqué par la montée du fascisme, Double Vie suit des personnages qui se réinventent à la croisée du kink, de la transidentité et du bilinguisme.
Avertissements : représentations d’anxiété, de TOC et de traumatismes intergénérationnels. Scènes de sexe explicites et consensuelles impliquant des pratiques alternatives telles que le jeu de rôle, la domination et la soumission, le « impact play », le « needle play », la dégradation et le non-consentement consenti.

Mateusz (they/he) is a bilingual trans playwright, actor, producer, and emerging translator. He is also a Polish settler living on occupied xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands. Through text-based and interdisciplinary approaches, they seek to disrupt the boundaries within form, gender, sexuality and language. Mateusz’s plays include Tomboy (Chłopczyca) (The Cultch & the frank theatre); Underground Absolute Fiction (Rumble Theatre); and Poly Queer Love Ballad (Queer Arts Festival, frank theatre and Zee Zee Theatre, Vancouver, and Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto). He has been nominated for two Jessie Richardson Awards, including Outstanding Original Script, and was the 2023 winner of the Wildfire National Playwriting Competition. They’ve performed with the National Arts Centre, The Only Animal, Savage Society, Firehall Arts Centre, and Théâtre La Seizième. His writing is published in This Is Beyond: A Time Capsule of Queer Experience (Playwrights Canada Press),Nuits Claires (Éditions Prise de parole) and JEU Magazine. Mateusz was the frank theatre’s Artistic Producer (2018-2026), and recently produced Christina Cook’s Postcards to My Younger Transexual Self (Neworld Theatre and PTC). He is a graduate of Studio 58.
