Ébauche d'un portrait

I'm often asked to talk about Jean-Luc, so it seemed simplest to listen to him tell us about his life for an hour and a half.

Through this very special relationship between the author and his Diary, a portrait emerges of a man who devoted his life to the theater and projected himself into the eternity of a work, apostrophizing the reader beyond his disappearance. It's the soap opera with Théâtre Ouvert, its hopes, its disappointments, its twists and turns, like a fifteen-year marital relationship... It's the soap opera of his illness, seven years of doubt, struggle and courage. It's the soap opera of his stage productions, his "successes" interspersed with despairing failures. Above all, it's the soap opera of his writing and his inability to write, of his constant questioning.

The words of Jean-Luc Lagarce are a part of our history, that of the end of the twentieth century, a theatrical life that unfolds but also a questioning of this barbarism of the world, of the necessity of the artist and his difficulty in being.

Throughout his theatrical life Jean-Luc Lagarce keeps his little notebooks (they begin with the creation of the Théâtre de la Roulotte in 1977), in which we find his doubts, his readings, the films and shows he sees and his constant questioning of the course of his life, his questioning of his loves and the meaning of his work.

François Berreur