Les Règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne

There's a kind of elegance and humor in Lagarce's writing that refuses pathos, pessimism, that works not to afflict us but to delight us. Lagarce's theater is a means of fighting pain, of warding off the fear of beginnings and endings, of loosening the noose. With a keen awareness of the derisory yet mysterious nature of the movement of life, Lagarce populates the stage with characters traversed by the jubilation of a linking word, caught up in a drive to say that merges with a drive to live.
"La Dame", so named in Les règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne, is a perfect illustration. A theatrical creature with no identity other than that conferred on her by the stage, Lagarce, through her, undermines those of the family and social game in the rules of art.
Les règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne is an acid and political manual of the habits and customs of a tidy life. Lagarce reveals the cruelty and greed of a society sure of the superiority of its codes.
The way he looks at the outdated customs of last century's bourgeois society allows us to assess the pressure of our own contemporary social customs, to glimpse the violence that new forms of rules codifying intimacy can take today.