Jean-Luc Lagarce

Jean-Luc Lagarce (14 February 1957 – 30 September 1995) was a French actor, theatre director and playwright.^[1] Although only moderately successful during his lifetime, since his death he has become one of the most widely-produced contemporary French playwrights.^[2]

Born in Héricourt, Haute-Saône,^[2] he was educated at the Université de Besançon.^[2] He was a cofounder of the Théâtre de La Roulotte in 1978,^[1] directing productions of playwrights such as Pierre de Marivaux, Eugène Marin Labiche and Eugène Ionesco before beginning to stage his own plays.^[1] Some of his early plays were criticized as derivative of Ionesco or Samuel Beckett.^[2] Although some of his plays were published by Théâtre Ouvert or recorded as radio dramas, only a few of them were ever staged during his lifetime.^[1]

Publishing 25 plays during his lifetime,^[1] he died of AIDS in 1995.^[1] He also published a volume of short stories, wrote an opera libretto and a film screenplay, and cofounded the publishing company Les Solitaires intempestifs.^[3] He was rediscovered by critics after his death,^[1] becoming more widely recognized as one of the most important modern French playwrights.^[2] This led to many productions overseas, such as the Brazilian version of Music-Hall by Luiz Päetow, which won the Theatre Shell Award in 2010.^[4]

In 2015, film director Xavier Dolan adapted Lagarce's Juste la fin du monde into the film It's Only the End of the World,^[5] which won the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.^[6] Le pays lointain was produced at theatre Odeon, Paris in 2019.

Works[edit]

Plays[edit]

• La bonne de chez Ducatel, 1977
• Erreur de construction, 1977
• Carthage, encore, 1978
• La Place de l'autre , 1979
• Voyage de Madame Knipper vers la Prusse Orientale, 1980
• Ici ou ailleurs, 1981
• Les Serviteurs, 1981
• Noce, 1982
• Vagues souvenirs de l'année de la peste, 1982
• Hollywood, 1983
• Histoire d'amour (repérages), 1983
• Retour à la citadelle, 1984
• Les Orphelins, 1984
• De Saxe, roman, 1985
• La Photographie, 1986
• Derniers remords avant l'oubli, 1987
• Les Solitaires intempestifs, 1987
• Music-hall, 1988
• Les Prétendants, 1989
• Juste la fin du monde, 1990
• Histoire d'amour (derniers chapitres), 1990
• Les règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne, 1993
• Nous, les héros, 1993
• Nous, les héros (version sans le père), 1993
• J'étais dans ma maison et j'attendais que la pluie vienne, 1994
• Le Pays lointain, 1995

Prose[edit]

• Trois récits, 1994, a collection of three short stories

Other fiction[edit]

• Quichotte, 1989, libretto for a jazz opera by Mike Westbrook^[7]
• Retour à l'automne, screenplay cowritten with Gérard Bouysse

Non-fiction[edit]

• Théâtre et Pouvoir en Occident, a study of how dramatists have contended with political power, from Ancient Greece to the middle of the twentieth century
• Journal, volume 1: 1977–1990, volume 2: 1990–1995

References[edit]