These plays by Lagarce – the ones from the middle of the 1980's, Les Prétendants, Derniers remords – tell stories, of course, but they're full of holes, ordinary mysteries. We'll never know (but does it matter?) the key to the enigmas posed at the beginning, scattered here and there. No more than in most good French families, in spite of notaries, priests and cops. Unlike run-of-the-mill television drama, the enigmas are not there to be solved, but to be told.
Derniers remords tells a story, but the raw material of its importance is the furious struggle with/against language, needed to relive this story. To live together, we must talk, and that's where it all begins to go wrong.Talking about money (like talking about love in Marivaux) is an perilous acrobatic exercise. Thus, we do all we can to talk about it while not talking about it (like about love in Marivaux…).

The scenery by the painter Chambas: a sort of poem about the play, a mental landscape, allowing the free flow of the languages and the liberty of the actors. To present Lagarce on stage, you need enough real elements to carry the weight of the story, and, at the same time, enough abstraction/poetry for the imagination to take off and for the actors to be able to successively adopt several different modes of presence (to be in the action, to listen without hearing, to hear without listening, etc)
Although very different aesthetically, the architecture of the scenery resembles like a brother that of our production of Jeu de l'amour et du hasard. This is just a coincidence of work. But perhaps it is not just chance, between the friendly cruelties of Lagarce and Marivaux...
To avoid the flat realism of the walls and an image closed on itself, Chambas started from the notion of nature, as represented in the painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet. Here too, two young men and a woman are placed in nature like a scandalous artifice. Anti-nature in fact. Lagarce's city-dwellers are not very natural, even if they are true.

Characters who do not "accumulate". The dramatic progression is not produced by "drrrrrrramatic" aggregation. As if each scene was the first one (and the only one!). It does not move forward like in traditional dramatic art, and yet it moves forward … towards forgetfulness. As in going backwards: Lagarce the melancholy clown.

In the beginning is the silence; and all the time too. The word tries its best to fill it. Jubilation for the actors, to experience this silence. Jubilation in communicating this jubilation to the audience.

A theatre that is very strongly situated historically (it would be wrong to deny it) and without a single historic anecdote: the promise of survival for this writing. Writing that is as novelistic as it is theatrical.

Paradoxes for the actors:
- Observe very closely the letter of the text, all these little second thoughts, adjustments, fussiness of grammar, AND consider this language as a simple tool, no more important than that … they throw themselves into the words, and it charges forward. Then later we think about what we said.
- Act on the surface, without any real depth (without "traditional" depth), AND thus traverse the dents and cuts in each situation. And then, it's healed and we go on to something else.
Lagarce does not confuse his characters with tragic heroes.

Delicate chiselling at the junctions between scenes: 27 scenes = 26 between-scenes! And what's more: short scenes, even ultra-short … Decisive choices regarding the incisiveness and the lightness of the story: "blacks", "greys", "swings", continuities ?... Probably no one single solution.

A Sunday in the country: free time, dilated/elastic. Chekhov.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, according to Kundera. Should we laugh or cry? The debate's been going on since Chekhov, to whom this particular Lagarce owes much.

CIORAN in a comedy !..

27 missed appointments in a row: most of the scenes (if not all of them) are failures: a lost generation (although adult and working) seen in a merciless and tender way, something that we don't see every day.

Working notes