Only the End of the World

The author's personal confession by Jean-Luc Lagarce. Hypnorealism.

The nineties. Successful, single and childless in his thirties, Louis arrives in the countryside to visit his family from Paris. He has been going home more and more sporadically, and it has been several years since his last visit. Cultural differences also divide families. He arrives to confide in his loved ones with a great and distressing secret. He is awaited by a mother, living in memories of the past and a dead father, a younger brother who stayed to care for his mother, his wife and the youngest sister, who considers Louis living in a big city to be her idol. Silence, embarrassment. Trying not to rub the still-living wounds thickens the tension.

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Everyone tries to keep emotions under control, to master their roles, but who is their author? Is mortifying yourself the only way to be together? Where are the boundaries of selfishness in family relationships and how important is it to protect your illusions about others? The demands of career and freedom take a beating with the demands of caring for loved ones. As if it was impossible to stand for anything. The pervasive guilt seeps through the whole house. Who makes up who in this family and who owes what to whom? How often to drive home? What is a home?

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A production on the border between reality and model. Theater and computer game. Family simulator.

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The autobiographical motif of the complicated relationship between an urban liberal intellectual and his family living in the countryside resonates in a stage play by France's most played contemporary playwright. The desire for intimacy against the background of motives of returning home, abandonment of loved ones, changes of place and identity, class and relationship to life and values, forms an important theme in French literature. We can find it in authors and authors such as Didier Eribon, Annie Ernaux, Michel Houellebecq and Édouard Louis, who chose his pseudonym after the name of the main character of the play Only the End of the World. We see the clash of different values between the city and the countryside, which is the breeding ground of today's culture wars, as well as experiencing the increasingly collapsing model of the traditional family, as the prologue of our Season 49: The End of Illusions.