After the performance.
When they leave the stage, in the wings, the actors of the company begin their lives, begin their lives again, their real lives. They leave the costumes of the play they have just performed for the nth time and return to their own clothes again. They are themselves again, that's what they would like to believe.

Like every evening, for the last few years, it did not go very well. They are tired, exhausted, disappointed with the life they are leading and perhaps they should give it up - that's what they are saying more or less out loud - leave this boat, abandon the venture, and go to the home they should never have left or set off for the bigger towns to try, again, without the others, a new adventure. Solo career.

We promise ourselves that we will not begin again; this evening, we will say what's on our minds and tomorrow, we will leave, we will leave the others to take the train without us, to carry their bags. It was, each one says it to himself or each one understands it little by little, "it was the last evening.

But we are celebrating an important event, this evening is a special evening. The eldest daughter is getting engaged, backstage, to the young leading man from the end of Act 1. She will marry him, they will be leaders of the theatre, they will play the company repertoire, despite all the hazards of existence, the badly-heated hotels, the aggressive little personnel of village halls and the sardonic indifference of the public and of idiotic children.

This evening, we are celebrating an engagement.
After the performance, we sing yet again, we perform the idiotic little sketches which always made us laugh - the ones we like best and which we keep for ourselves - we dance an old routine which we learned for an old rubbishy revue, we remember the time of our past glory at the Kristall-Palast in Leipzig. We giggle, we impersonate, we scream with laughter and sometimes, too, we indulge in nostalgia.

Tomorrow we will flee, but this evening yet again, we pretend, since we don't know how to do anything else.

Jean-Luc Lagarce