Joël Jouanneau: I really wanted to meet you as I've been working on the plays of Jean-Luc Lagarce for the last three years now, in courses and by directing three works with (for me) a single theme: Juste la fin du monde (Just the end of the world), J'étais dans ma maison et j'attendais que la pluie vienne (I was in my house waiting for the rain to come) and Le Pays lointain (Distant country) (in workshop with students of the Paris Conservatoire). These three works have two essential reference points: a return to the country of birth and a return to the family after a break, and also the main character's announcement to his family of his approaching death. Until now, only J'étais dans ma maison et j'attendais que la pluie vienne happens to be known. The first play, Juste la fin du monde, which was written earlier, is unknown, and we are about to discover the third one, Le Pays lointain, to be directed by François Rancillac at the Tempête. I would like you to tell me how these three plays were created.

François Berreur: The first play, Juste la fin du monde, was written in Berlin where Jean-Luc Lagarce was on a Leonardo da Vinci grant (Villa Medicis extra muros). What is rather paradoxical is that this play, about a return to the family, was written when he was furthest away from his country and his family. He finished writing the play in July, 1990. There was no reaction when he presented it to the usual readers. For I must explain that, although his plays were not frequently staged during his lifetime, they were all either published, or staged, or broadcast on France Culture, or presented in a reading or a staged reading. But for this play, there was no response. After this - according to what he wrote in a piece called How I write - he wrote nothing for two years. I think this play represents a quite important development in his writing. Two years passed before he wrote J'étais dans ma maison… where indeed the same theme rings out. But here the character of the returning son says nothing, remains silent. Knowing Jean-Luc Lagarce a little, I think it's an allusion, for in Juste la fin du monde, the son returns in order to say something but no-one listens to him. In the next play, he returns and says nothing. When he wrote the third play, Le Pays Lointain, in 1995, he took the whole of Juste la fin du monde and added other characters. I think it was also his somewhat stubborn way of maintaining against all odds that the play Juste la fin du monde was essential for him.

Joël Jouanneau: These three plays pose the question of the relationship between writing and biography. Jean-Luc Lagarce learns that he has Aids, and in these three plays, the main character comes back, either to die or to announce his approaching death. I find it interesting to observe how Jean-Luc Lagarce takes such a significant biographical fact and how he transforms it.

François Berreur: At the same time he transforms it, but the prism of his illness can over-simplify. He learned that he was HIV positive in 1986, but in 1982 he wrote a play, Vague souvenir de l'année de la peste (A vague memory of the year of the plague), where the same themes of disappearance and epidemic are found. In 1982, the virus hadn't even been named and he didn't know he was ill. All of which is to state and to put into perspective the directly biographical links with disappearance. After that, the relationship between the writer and autobiography remains mysterious.

Joël Jouanneau: Something that struck me in all three plays is that the character of the father is either absent or dead. In the last play, he even appears as a character called "the already-dead father". Knowing nothing of the life of Jean-Luc Lagarce when I began this work - surely a very naive and very simple approach to the script - I was sure that the father of Jean-Luc Lagarce had died or disappeared. I was very surprised to learn that he was alive.

François Berreur: Jean-Luc Lagarce's work develops in the direction of this relationship with the intimate. Not in a realistic need to deliver his innermost self, but more in the direction of trying to be utterly honest with himself and his relationship with the world. Within this process is the belief that from the moment he is in harmony with his own inner self, this concerns everyone's inner self. I also believe that this is the force of his theatre, in particular his later plays, and that in this way, he achieves universality through this process. After Juste la fin du monde, Jean-Luc Lagarce stopped writing plays for two years but he continued to write his journal. He began it in 1978 at the very moment when he began the theatre. He stopped in 1995. He thus began his journal when he began to write.

Joël Jouanneau: In these three plays, if the absence of the father is deliberate, we must ask why?

François Berreur: To reply to your question, I'll read a short extract from his journal. It's in Berlin, 7th May, 1990, i.e., during the writing of Juste la fin du monde. In the beginning, this play was called Quelques éclaircies (Some sunny spells). He changed the title a little later: "I get up late. I go to bed very late. I work a little and I spend the afternoon doing nothing and that's where your taxes go. I try, quite determinedly and almost desperately, to work on Quelques éclaircies. I've already re-written the beginning ten times but it's not brilliant. I killed the father this morning and everyone knows it's the best thing to do." I don't know how to interpret this but what it reveals is a dramatic need and not a tortured relationship with the disappearance or not of the father. The writing, the functioning of the writing, has its own underlying needs.

Joël Jouanneau: I think that phrase is a writer's founding act, and it really explains many things about these three plays. There is something I've been able to verify through my work on the plays of Jean-Luc Lagarce. On a first reading, his writing appears extremely repetitive, writing that ploughs the same furrow, that plays on the constant repetition of phrases. His writing has a quite particular "music". I've always felt that. I like the fluency of his language very much. He works with an extremely limited number of words that are virtually among the most simple in the French language. However, once you've worked on Lagarce with actors, you notice that in fact there's never any repetition, never any repetitiveness apart from changes of verbs and tenses. There is a sort of search for truth through language that is particular to him: it's his "music".

François Berreur: I'd like to speak more about "preciseness". All the characters try to say exactly, the most precisely possible, what they wish to communicate to others. It is the energy expended trying to convince or to be understood that creates the energy drawn on by the actor. These scripts have incredible theatrical vitality. When I worked on Le Voyage à La Haye (The journey to The Hague), a narrative monologue with no stage directions, I was utterly convinced that the script brought its energy to the actors who discovered its meaning. This is indeed the whole mystery of theatrical writing. It's not because it's written in dialogue that it's theatre. The mystery of theatrical writing occurs when an actor, by taking the words into his mouth, opens up meanings that reading had not revealed. I also think that the great strength of the theatre of Jean-Luc Lagarce, and perhaps also the difficulty we've generally had in understanding his writing, is that it is linked by its musicality and its style to an almost eighteenth-century tradition of language. These are very simple words which directly touch our inner selves. The fact of knowing something about his life, his illness or other biographical details, can sometimes have the tendency to crush the more serene vision - or rather the sound - of the poet, instead of revealing meaning. At the time, we felt the violent thing in the writer's body more than he expressed it.

Joël Jouanneau: I've been working on the scripts of Lagarce for three years now, and I don't think I've finished with him yet. I think I know why: when I heard Retour à la Citadelle (Return to the citadel) on Open Theatre, I immediately saw a link with a play which was very significant for me, Par les villages (Through the villages) by Peter Handke. I think these two great poets have some things in common. There is the link of the return to the country of birth, the link between the intellectual and the salaried worker (the two brothers are of a different social status and this weighs very strongly in La fin du monde). Another thing came to me which touched me very strongly when I was working on Juste la fin du monde: I had never felt so close to the work I had previously done on Les enfants Tanner (The Tanner children) by Robert Walser, on the family circle, a place of no escape and at the same time a place of pure emotion. I don't even know if Lagarce had read Walser or not.

François Berreur: He knew and liked Walser very much. There were for him two fundamental texts in the contemporary repertoire, La trilogie du revoir (The trilogy of seeing again) by Botho Strauss, the links with art and with the group, and the circulation of groups, families and love relationships, and then obviously Par les villages. After writing Juste la fin du monde in Berlin, and just after the difficult break of the following years, he assembled a collection of texts that he called Les solitaires intempestifs (The out-of-time loners), where the publishers' name comes from. It is a collage of his literary memory. Solitaires intempestifs is from a line in Par les villages. >From memory, I quote: "Don't be out-of-time loners, don't you see, in the distress you are in, the faint glow of the gods, follow the path and look up at the sky .... ". Which means, don't wallow in a feeling of despair. The writings of Jean-Luc Lagarce take up the same themes.

Joël Jouanneau: We could speak of the final monologue of the character called Louis who is already in Juste la fin du monde and who closes Le Pays Lointain: The cry. For me it is one of the finest endings in contemporary theatre. The character is on a viaduct, at night, a railway line with the abyss below and the sky above and this desire he has to shout once and for all a long and joyful cry. And he doesn't do it. I remember a discussion I had with Olivier Py about that cry. I still feel this cry is somewhat like the pope's cry in Bacon. The cry of he who, suddenly, perhaps, has doubts and finds himself face to face with nothingness. Olivier saw it as a cry of joy.

François Berreur: He does indeed have this permanent cry in his writing. As far as the cry you're speaking of is concerned, it is indeed in the last script, Pays Lointain, written by Jean-Luc Lagarce in 1995 just before his death. Many commentators have said that the writing of Jean-Luc Lagarce ended with a cry. But in fact, the whole of this text is identical to the one written in 1990, Juste la fin du Monde. In '84 or '85, even if the notion of the cry is not yet present, the whole description of the passage on the railway line already exists. I believe this puts into perspective what we think we know. Just when we think we've grasped his writing, it escapes us. You should also know that Jean-Luc Lagarce used to say that Retour à la citadelle is the founding text of Juste la fin du monde. What we haven't spoken of is his training in philosophy. He stopped philosophy to write for the theatre. He wrote a master's thesis "Power and the theatre in Western society" where the relationship of theatre with the institution is viewed across the entire history of theatre from its origins. But he stopped in 1980, saying: "The new generation is doing exactly the same thing as when Molière played for the king. The revolutionaries of 1968 are doing the same thing with the institution in 1980 by taking over the power of the institution". And he ends by saying: "In any case, art remains". And obviously, he chose art.