It's just a matter of admitting the danger of never returning to our certainties. Not to be afraid to look at ourselves under the flickering lights of the stage and with our wandering attention.

To walk with measured steps in the faint light which separates dreaming from waking, the auditorium from the stage. Perhaps to go to the front of our own imagination, to enter our own novel, to cross this border where the audience is, and, facing the front, under the lights, to be the protagonists of the tale.

And like a book that we can enter, we enter the story like moving forward on the stage, we go into the novel like mentally travelling in the words and in the phrases, we pick up the costumes and become the characters, we put ourselves on show, the idea of childhood, like going walking in one's own imagination, like an explorer and a director of one's life, we play-act and we say play-acting is the truth that's truer than true.

And when calm comes at the end of the dream, when the dead stand up and the actors take their bows, and when calm returns to the emotions, when they return to normal, there remains, like a slight pain, a little death, the memory of this time of falsehood, and the secret hope that this new life is the beginning of yet another new play, the doorway to yet another dream, even greater than the others and including them all, stretching to infinity, for ever.

A propos de l'Illusion comique (About the Comic Illusion)
JEAN-LUC LAGARCE
October, 1994