It’s Only the End of the World

The 1990s. Successful, single and childless thirty-something Parisian Louis visits his family in the country. His visits are becoming less and less frequent and a long time has passed since the last time he came. Cultural differences divide families, too. Louis returns home to confide a great and weighty secret and is welcome by his mother living in the past and memories of his dead father, his brother who stayed to take care of their mother, his brother’s wife and his youngest sister who looks up to her older brother living in the city. Silence and awkwardness. Tension grows as they all try not to reopen old wounds that still hurt.

Everyone is trying to keep their emotions under control, to play their parts, but who defined those parts? Is self-repression the only way to be together? Where are the limits of selfishness in family relationships and how important is it to protect the illusions about others? Career ambitions and claims of freedom clash with the requirement to look after our loved ones. It’s as if succeeding at anything were impossible. Omnipresent guilt permeates the entire house. Who creates who in this family and who owes who what? How often should we return home? What is home, anyway?

A production between reality and a model. Theatre and a PC game. A family simulator.

The play by today’s most staged French playwright explores the autobiographical motive of a complicated relationship between a liberal intellectual from the city and his family in the country. Desire for intimacy against the background of motives of returning home, leaving our loved ones behind, changing place and identity, changing our social class, and our relationship towards life and life values are an important theme in French literature. It can be found in the work of Didier Eribon, Annie Ernaux, Michel Houellebecq or Édouard Louis, whose pseudonym was inspired by Louis, the main protagonist of It’s Only the End of the World. We see the play as a prologue to our Season 49: End of illusions, as it depicts the clash of different values between the city and the countryside, a breeding ground for today’s culture wars, and the erosion of traditional family.