The director is being replaced in a rural cultural institution: the old director's farewell and the inauguration of the new director are in progress. Here is the representative of the ministry, the cultural manager of the local government, the old director and his colleagues who are afraid of being fired, and here is also the new, young director, with a friend whose role is still unclear. The board of directors helplessly follows the events, no one asks for their approval. Strangely enough, almost everyone's spouse accompanies them to the ceremony, and we slowly realize that this public-funded institution is actually a family business, whose turbulent waters are also ruffled by personal storms.
Jean-Luc Lagarce's comedy is a choral work for seventeen voices. The seventeen actors are almost constantly present on stage, and as with Chekhov, the real conflicts take place below the apparent uneventful surface. A misspoken word, a bitten half-sentence, a few clichés or cynical comments cause the erupting crisis, the banality of which is laughable and deplorable.