This play features ten people, all elderly, six men and four women, along with one’s simple-minded daughter. For more than thirty years, they have been going on holidays to the same place, spending a week in the sun, in a hotel resort, in Spain or somewhere similar. If they had the means, they would go elsewhere but they come from a modest class and have no other way to escape their daily lives. Thus, they have been running into each other in this place for years, they know but don’t know each other. They never see each other anywhere else. Only here, once a year. For so long. For some this may be the last time. Others have probably already disappeared. This play is a symphony of farewells performed before our eyes. We are in a time that is no longer linear, only memory. What remains, what are the faces, the facts and the emotions that persist? “I couldn’t have written this text”, explains Lars Norén, “before reaching the age I am today. It’s a play about goodbyes and memories, on the last waves you pass through before the end. A beautiful and melancholy play that speaks only of life.” (Lars Noren)

Read our interview (in French) with Lars Noren : « Atteindre l'essence de chaque chose »
The play script, published by L’Arche Éditeur, is available at our Boutique

The time of the theatrical performance is a short time. The classical rules of the seventeenth century required the action to take place within one day so as to guarantee the plausibility of the plot, a constraint that prevented authors from developing their characters psychologically, and, furthermore, prohibited them from “aging” them. The characters who raise the question of old age are therefore often elderly characters whose social status puts them in a position of responsibility or authority over others. These characters belong to the “noble fathers” tradition in comedy, or that of “kings” in tragedy.

Elderly characters, from Don Diegue to King Lear, pose the question of the authority of the older generation over the young, the challenging of this authority by the latter and the fragility of our actions.

Far from these heroic characters, anti-heroes are legion among old characters. In a more overtly comic register, noble fathers and mothers, are replaced by a highly codified range of old fogeys:manteaux, barbons, duègnes, grimes and ganaches. so many roles that deride old age, relegated to farce and seen as a hindrance to the vitality of life and the actions of the younger characters. The character of Peer Gynt, in Ibsen’s play of the same name, is one of the few characters in the theatre repertoire whose entire life journey is marked by the pursuit of the self but whose final moments are still inspired by a youthful and immature drive.

The contemporary repertoire deals with the question of the end of life more frontally, often linking it to existential questions about the meaning of life and our relations with others. It is to this type of approach, in which old age is often incarnated chorally, that Lars Norén’s play belongs: that of Ionesco (Les Chaises, Le Roi se meurt) and Beckett (End Game,Happy Days).

Staging: Lars Norén
Translation**:** Aino Höglund
Translation and artistic collaboration**:** Amélie Wendling
Scenography: Gilles Taschet
Costumes: Renato Bianchi
Lights: Bertrand Couderc
Sounds: Léonard Françon
Choregraphy**:** Glysleïn Lefever

and
Maxime Alexandre: a child (alternating)
Margaux Guillou**:** a child (alternating)
Rosalie Trigano**:** a child (alternating)