It's Only the End of the World has a deceptively simple plot: Louis, a terminally ill artist, returns home after a long absence to tell his family that he is dying. Instead, during this last day with his family, in a merry thanksgiving day-like atmosphere of long anticipated reunion, everyone empties their emotional bags. His imminent death stays secret between Louis and the audience. Although it is a play about one family's inability to communicate, it is wonderfully gentle, optimistic, and funny.

Structurally, It's Only the End of the World appears to be a series of monologues - the appearance is deceiving. Lagarce's language, beside being poetic and rhythmic, is fresh, disturbing, and playful. The characters' effort to find the right word (and frequent failure to do so), their readiness to correct themselves, to repeat a phrase endlessly, bring out humor of a kind we find in Ionesco or Beckett.

It's Only the End of the World makes us all super aware of our own mortality, our own missed opportunities and inability to separate important from unimportant. Written at the time when Lagarce himself learned he was dying, " World" reads like a gift to those who stay behind.

What makes us bitter and unhappy? What stops us from communicating? Why is language not helping? Why are we unable to be true to ourselves? Silent presence of death in Lagarce's play makes these questions urgent.

"To no longer be afraid, or to pretend, and before so much pretence, to gain the necessary calm in the end, or to try to at least flee the fear of fear, to eliminate just this one, to no longer be pushed around, to drown the demons, to keep smiling." Excerpt from Lagarce's journal du TNS - n° 8