Derniers remords avant l'oubli

Jean-Luc Lagarce likes to write about reunions - of close friends, for example - who have shared, in the past, an intense experience of life together. Reunions that follow long years of tense, cold separation, during which each has mourned their illusions, adopting a classic lifestyle, as our modern world draws us. As if the tear were inescapable after an attempt to live away from more standard patterns!

But the reunion stirs up the wounds left open and gaping. Time doesn't file the scars away into an amnesiac past. It just manages to cover them with regrets, a taste of unfinished business or bitterness. The very thing that undermines and gnaws at the inner self, eventually forming an abscess. Old misunderstandings are deafened. Old grudges thinly veiled. The reunion then becomes an arena for settling scores, with the same inability to explain oneself or express one's opinion without running the risk of being caught out by the other. Everyone is watching each other, spying on each other, on the lookout or on the defensive. It's a very animalistic relationship, wrapped up in layers of courtesy and good manners that ensure we don't rip each other to shreds. But any explosion remains underlying.