You have already directed two plays by Jean-Luc Lagarce, RETOUR À LA CITADELLE (at the Scène nationale in Bar-le-Duc) in 1990 and LES PRÉTENDANTS (with the amateur company Théâtre en Actes, in Paris) in 1992, plus a staged reading, I believe, of NOUS, LES HÉROS (again in Bar-le-Duc) in 1996. How do you explain such loyalty?

F.R. : Love, of course! (laughs) Joking aside, it's true that I encountered Lagarce's work in my earliest days as a director, in 1985, when I was directing my first production, of Racine's BRITANNICUS. I was desperately reading contemporary theatre for a new project and at last I happened upon RETOUR À LA CITADELLE. The first ten lines of the play were enough, I knew I'd found it! Yes, it was love at first sight, really! Since then, this writing, so unusual and which moves me so much, has never really left me. Paradoxically, while I feel intimately concerned by the theatre and the universe of Lagarce, with the impression of being totally in phase with his way of regarding our little world, and with the rhythm of his very particular language, at the same time, the director in me is completely taken aback by his plays, I find myself disarmed of all my savoir-faire, every time I have the impression that I have to begin again from zero, to reinvent another way of working, of imagining the space, the time, the acting, and so on. I tear my hair out! And my whole team with me! Fortunately, before going bald, we find working directions, elements of response, and off we go again on a new adventure. It's certainly thanks to this paradox, to this enigma in his writing, that the desire to stage, to create other performances is born and reborn again and again ...

Curiously, if I have understood correctly, an earlier version of LE PAYS LOINTAIN exists ...

F.R. : Yes, JUSTE LA FIN DU MONDE, for which Joël Jouanneau has only just done the very first production, at the Théâtre de la Colline, in Paris. This play was written in 1990, and already describes the return of Louis (here aged 34) to his family to inform them of his approaching death. But at that time, 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 ... (Need I add, by the way, that in his lifetime, Lagarce had all the trouble in the world to be recognised as a dramatist? Obviously, he simply had to die for everyone to immediately proclaim him a genius! Say no more.). But in 1995, just a few months before his death, Lagarce took the manuscript out again, but this time to include it, almost as is, in a new, much more extensive project which completely changes its scope: LE PAYS LOINTAIN. So, once again, Louis (who is now almost 40) decides to see his family again one last time. But now, this 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 (and Lagarce's!) is thus deeply moving, but completely crazy: to summon on stage, one last time, all the men and women he may have met during his lifetime, whether fleetingly or lastingly, whether already dead or still alive, from the "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 what 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? In short, the play has become a great inner journey, a magnificent adieu to the world and an impossible theatrical dream ...

Reading the script, which is indeed very moving, one wonders how much of it is autobiographical ...

F.R. : From the little I know of the personal life of Lagarce and of his battle with Aids, it's certainly not difficult to imagine there is a lot of himself in this play, even if many things do not correspond (he never tried, as far as I know, to break off all contact with his family, like Louis, and his father is fortunately still alive, etc). However, there's strictly no point in trying to sort out the "real-life", the "true", from what has been "invented", it's not a real problem. On the one hand, I have no desire to put on the stage a posthumous tribute to Jean-Luc Lagarce (he himself would have hated that!). On the other hand, (and excuse the banality), it is precisely because he dared to plunge into what was undoubtedly the most intimate part of himself, that he could reach the universal, that he could, thanks to the effort of writing, hand us a mirror where each one of us can recognise ourselves. I must insist, he is first and foremost a writer, who had truly studied the theatre and the nature of performance, and who worked the language bodily. The miracle is that this writing, so sophisticated and apparently so "formal", can carry such accuracy, such emotion, to the point of even provoking at times a "reality" effect, where every person, whatever his age, his sex, his sexuality, in short his life, believes he's up there on the stage. In addition, he didn't call his characters "my mother", "my father", "my lover", etc, but THE mother, THE father, THE lover, and so on. And finally, we must remember that with Lagarce, there is a major safeguard against any temptation to indulge in narcissism or morbidity: his incredible sense of humour, certainly caustic, but which always allows a certain distance to be kept, a kind of sense of propriety, to say things without really spelling them out, by calling on the intelligence of the audience. Even if he digs in with a scalpel where it hurts, it's always with this terrible but saving humour (and this laugh is what interests me: it's funny because it's terrible...).