Juste la fin du monde

When you hear Lagarce at the theater, you hear above all the words and the voice. His phrases seem scarcely thought out, breathed into the mouth by actors one might imagine improvising and thinking them up themselves. Except that, behind the apparent spontaneity, we quickly hear a music too refined to have been born of the simple chance of the conversations being played out. It's an art of dialogue that erases after the fact the artifices the author used to construct it. It transcends the natural, and subtly lyricizes the slightest, yet seemingly banal, exchange between members of the same family. This is the case in Juste la fin du monde, for example, where processes such as hemming in haute couture are so mastered that we no longer notice them. It's a fine piece of work, the work of a goldsmith, revealing the hesitations and frailties of the human soul and feelings in short, seemingly just-spoken sentences that are in fact highly written, planned and syncopated in the right place. Lagarce's breathless, hesitant writing gives us the breath of a man deeply in love with our failures and fragile questionings. Underneath the gentle cruelty of a language that's almost sung, hummed, sometimes screamed when the human comedy becomes too painful. Everywhere in this theater, "un air de famille" floats...

Cécile Brochard