It’s Only the End of the World, by Jean-Luc Lagarce
Director: Anja Suša
Translation: Anders Bodegård
Dramaturgy: Marie Persson Hedenius
Set design: Ulla Kassius
Performers: Erik Borgeke, Anna Carlsson, Moa Silén, Logi Tulinius, Elisabeth Wernesjö
Venue: Uppsala City Theatre
Running time: 1h 45min

Not a day too early! What else is one to say when “It’s Only the End of the World” by Jean-Luc Lagarce, one of the most performed French playwrights, is for the first time put on a scene in Sweden. Lagarce managed to write 25 plays before he died in 1995, only 38 years old.

“It’s Only the End of the World” describes one family’s painful incapability to communicate. Words are flowing, but extremely little is being said. In the center of this ranting emptiness, we find Louis, a 30-year old big brother who, after many years of absence, suddenly shows up. His return poses a threat to the family’s emotional hierarchy. All of a sudden, the relations between mother, siblings and their spouses shift. Elisabeth Wernesjö’s little sister is electrical, like a rabbit in Duracell commercials, and Logi Tulinius’ little brother is authoritarianly jealous. Moa Silén’s sister-in-law fights in vain to mitigate this.

But almost everything is being hidden behind the uptight politeness. The façade is so thick that Louis never succeeds in breaking through and telling the real cause of his rare visit – he is dying of AIDS.

Like refrigerator magnets, family members stick firmly to each other and to the scene’s austere background walls, in which a horizontal gap represents an opening for memories and details.

For example, an opening for a car described by Anna Carlson, who plays the mother. A metaphor for that which did not come true, but is nonetheless pretended to be true. The family car was black, but it should, of course, be red, as the feelings that were never expressed.

“It’s Only the End of the World” is composed of a long, twisty series of monologs, in the past, present and future. The impression is next to hallucinatory, a stoned theater grammar that circles around a sinkhole that nobody dares to look into.

That which is not formulated in words seeks its expression in the body. The ensemble crawls, dances, twists itself in slow motion around Erik Borgeke’s Louis. These are the movements of grasping for air, painfully comical.

Directed by Anja Suša, with the set design by Ulla Kassius and choreography by Damjan Kecojevic, as well as the ensemble’s razor sharp expression, “It’s Only the End of the World” is definitely ingenious theater.

Pia Huss

French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce died in 1995, only 38 years old, from AIDS. It was only after his death that his plays started to be performed seriously. His play “It’s Only the End of the World” has now had a Swedish premiere at Uppsala City Theatre, directed by Serbian director Anja Suša.

Louis is 34 years old and has a terminal disease. He is visiting his family – his mother and younger sister that still live in their home, together with his brother and his wife. The contact between them is poor, with mixed messages, composed of denying and averting babble.

Pay attention – this sounds like a middle-class play with a naturalistic performing style, among fine pieces of design furniture.

But Anja Suša, who has previously directed artistically headstrong performances at Backa Theatre and Helsingborg City Theatre, does of course something completely different. She takes Lagarce’s already hiccupping, twisted and turned dialogue, in an effective translation by Anders Bodegård, and together with set designer Ulla Kassius and choreographer Damjan Kecojevic, transforms this play into a mechanical toy, a comic strip.

The lamps are swinging, the cake is made of plaster, the gravel is crunching and the Alpes are peeping through the window – and all of this somewhat childishly obvious setting, as if it was drawn by thick pieces of chalk, is despite that not at all superficial nor mechanical.

On the contrary, Suša has constructed a very clear form for the actors to take off from, and the cast is superb: Anna Carlson, Erik Borgeke, Elisabeth Wernesjö, Logi Tulinius and Moa Silén – they all succeed in filling these frames with feeling and will and expression.

And it is exactly like this: a dysfunctional, denying, disappointed, longing, angry and loving family, around a wound and sorrow. Anja Suša surprises us once again with her ability to play with the theater toy box, without tampering with emotions nor presence.

Maria Edström

”It’s Only the End of the World”
By Jean-Luc Lagarce
Translation: Andreas Bodegård
Director: Anja Suša
Dramaturgist: Marie Persson Hedenius
Set Design & Costume: Ulla Kassius
Assistent scene and costume designer: Hedvig Ljungar
Light design: Mats Öhlin
Make-up and wig design: Johanna Rönnbäck, Ella Carlefalk (trainee from STDH)
Original music: Igor Gostuski
Choreography: Damjan Kecojević
Swedish premiere at Uppsala City Theatre, Small Scene, December 3, 2016

There is no defence against Jean-Luc Lagarce’s “It’s Only the End of the World”. It is a powerful settlement against the false ideals of the nuclear family. Louis comes back home to visit his family, which he has not seen in over ten years. He is ill and knows that he is going to die soon, and he believes or hopes that he will be able to meet his nearest kin. He dreams those false dreams, which we are constantly lured into by society, about how blood and family ties are, after all, that which we belong to and a place where we are loved.

Louis does not get an opportunity to tell about his death sentence. All the members of his family are occupied with their own problems and fears, nobody is prepared to listen to him, and everybody takes it for granted that he sees himself as superior to them. Louis has, of course, succeeded as a writer, while they just go on living their ordinary, working class lives. Each one of them is caught in their own life grieves and nobody is open to listen to what Louis may have to say. Nobody is even open to the idea that Louis may have something to say.

It is an extremely terrifying and dark take on the confined family life. Louis family is a normal one, nobody of its members has social problems or addictions – it is precisely such a family that is hailed as the meaning of life. I almost get a stomach ache from how accurately this production depicts our endless human loneliness and the bluff of family love. It is, however, at the same time liberating to see that somebody was able to describe it so accurately.

The fact that this drama premieres in the middle of Christmas preparations in Sweden is precisely what hits the spot. Christmas that is celebrated in the West as a grand family holiday is nothing more than one big illusion. This production does not mention Christmas, nor does it contain anything Christmas-like, it is I who is drawing this parallel. Christmas, as it is celebrated in the West, is a time of great anxiety for all of those who lost their near and dear – because it is at Christmas time that we should meet our next of kin and are expected to feel the family love.

But is it really there? Does it really exist, when so many are left lonely and out of it all? When families get together and do not allow any outsiders in, how loving is it then, if it is enough just for themselves? The family in “It’s Only the End of the World” is joined together more by a habit and cowardice, since the members do not dare go outside of this circle, then by some special kind of love – in fact, nobody there listens to anybody else. This is powerfully depicted and conveyed in Anja Suša’s production.

We celebrate Christmas because Jesus was born – and his birth is perhaps far from the traditional Christmas nuclear family. His father Joseph is not his biological father, Jesus was born in a stable because his mother and father were forced to leave for Bethlehem, in order to be accounted for and pay their taxes, since they had their roots there. This means we can assume that they had relatives there. Relatives who did not welcome them. They had to seek shelter in a stable, and the shepherds, who must have been seen as some sort of an underclass, were the first who welcomed this newborn baby. Then came foreign men from other countries, with different culture and religion, and celebrated the little one – and then the parents had to flee to a foreign country with the child. This is fairly far from the holy nuclear family that Christmas is dedicated to in modern Sweden. Although Jean-Luc Lagarce does not in any way refer to the false Christmas celebration, my opinion is that his powerful, dark drama can be applied to Christmas in the highest possible degree.

This production is played in a way that is almost impossible to describe – body language and speech are far from naturalistic, they are some sort of a dance-like mime – it must be seen. The physical way in which this drama is played speaks to me as the spectator through many different channels, with feelings, with language, with body language, with mime, with sound. Uppsala City Theatre describes in the following way:

From the perspective of Louis, we get to participate in a different kind of a reunion. This production tests the theatrical limits with its poetic wordiness and does not resemble anything that has previously been played on the Small scene.

Jean-Luc Lagarce is today one of the most performed modern playwrights in France and is widely recognized as one of the most important French dramatists of the late 20th century. There are presumably quite a lot of his personal experiences in this drama. He himself died before the play had its premiere. After his death in 1995, the interest in his work picked up and his plays were set up on stage, debated on and translated in wider and wider circles. During his lifetime, Lagarce was first and foremost known as a director and his productions of plays by Molière, Ionescu and Marivaux achieved great success. Only a few of his own plays were put on stage during his lifetime – “It’s Only the End of the World” was performed for the first time in 1999, that is to say, four years after Lagarce’s death.

French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan has made a film based on this play. His version of “It’s Only the End of the World” premiered in May 2016 at Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix.