Einfach das Ende der Welt

He left without saying goodbye. It has now been twelve years since Louis turned his back on his family and the provincial, middle-class milieu he grew up in. The rest has been silence, except for »elliptical« postcards and the briefest of letters sent from all over the world: »I’m fine, hope you are too.« In the meantime, Louis has established himself as a successful writer in the big city and moved further and further away from his roots, and not just in terms of space. But now he is returning.

How do members of a family who haven’t spoken to each other for a long time behave when they are reunited? What expectations do they have of each other and what image of each other do they have in their minds that the others still have to align with? After the happiness of seeing each other again, after some trivial conversation, old wounds quickly reopen and the family becomes entangled in conflicts and things that have long gone unsaid. It’s not only Louis’s world that has continued to turn in the twelve years of silence. His youngest sister, still a child when he left, has grown up. His younger brother, now married and a father, has tried to fill the gap left by Louis. Life has moved on for everybody: »You don’t know me any more, you haven’t known me for a long time. You don’t know who I am – you never knew.«

Stage director Max Lindemann is interested in the big conflicts and tragedies in the microcosm of the family and in what remains unspoken between the words. The people in our family are the ones who supposedly know us best. But what time weighs heavier, the time spent together or the time spent apart? How strong are family ties? What causes a person to break with their family? Is drama all that remains? Louis has returned to give his family some sad news. But after all that has been said, it won’t be enough for them. »You have to have needed us sometime. You have to have regretted not being able to tell us.«

French author Jean-Luc Lagarce was born in 1957 in the Haute-Saône region. He studied philosophy and drama at the Conservatoire National de Région. He founded an amateur theatre group, Théâtre de la Roulotte, with members of the conservatoire and began directing and writing his own plays. He wrote Juste la fin du monde (It’s Only the End of the World) in 1990; the play has parallels with Lagarce’s own biography. He wrote his final text, Le Pays lointain (The Distant Land), in 1995 while on a working visit to Berlin. Two weeks after completing it, he died of AIDS in Paris at the age of 38. Juste la fin du monde received its premiere in 1999, at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris. Jean-Luc Lagarce is one of the most frequently performed playwrights in France. His plays have long been part of the French school curriculum. Juste la fin du monde was made into a film by Xavier Dolan in 2016 with a high-profile cast, winning several awards, among them the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.