In 1990, Jean-Luc Lagarce wrote the magnificent Juste la fin du monde (recently produced for the first time by Joël Jouanneau), the story (already) of Louis (aged 34) returning to his family to inform them of his approaching death. But within the "profession", the reaction to the manuscript was either bored indifference or annoyed contempt, so Lagarce put it away in a bottom drawer, and several years passed before he was able to write a new play. It was in 1995, just a few months before his death, that he took the manuscript out again, but this time it was to include it almost as is, in a new and much more extensive project, completely enlarging its scope: Le Pays lointain.

So, once again, Louis (who is now almost 40) decides to see his family again one last time. But this time, the return to square one is the occasion for an immense soul-searching into his whole existence since his departure, his escape far away from his family and his birthplace, a huge look backwards over all the years devoted to inventing freely for himself (or so he believed) a new life, another family, another destiny ...

Louis's project (Lagarce's?), then, is deeply moving, but completely crazy: to summon on stage, one last time, all the men and women he could have met during his lifetime, whether fleetingly or lastingly, whether they are already dead or still alive, from his "natural family", the inherited one, to "the Other family", the one invented for himself. The project is crazy, it quickly proves impossible: how not to forget anyone? How to catch up a whole life ? How to give a name to that which links us to others, in spite of everything, in spite of ourselves? Is it not also, without admitting it (but not for much longer), an umpteenth pathetic trick to reassure ourselves yet again before the inevitable?

At the end of one of the richest and most original bodies of dramatic writing today, Le Pays lointain has become a magnificent, impossible theatrical dream in the form of a farewell to the world, a last attempt, ironic and proud, joyful and desperate, to seize the very essence of life in this world, an ultimate smile before the final click: Curtain!