Jean-Luc Lagarce

Jean-Luc Lagarce (14 February 1957 – 30 September 1995) was a French actor, theatre director and playwright.[1] Although only moderately successful during his lifetime, since his death he has become one of the most widely-produced contemporary French playwrights.[2]

Born in Héricourt, Haute-Saône,[2] he was educated at the Université de Besançon.[2] He was a cofounder of the Théâtre de La Roulotte in 1978,[1] directing productions of playwrights such as Pierre de Marivaux, Eugène Marin Labiche and Eugène Ionesco before beginning to stage his own plays.[1] Some of his early plays were criticized as derivative of Ionesco or Samuel Beckett.[2] Although some of his plays were published by Théâtre Ouvert or recorded as radio dramas, only a few of them were ever staged during his lifetime.[1]

Publishing 25 plays during his lifetime,[1] he died of AIDS in 1995.[1] He also published a volume of short stories, wrote an opera libretto and a film screenplay, and cofounded the publishing company Les Solitaires intempestifs.[3] He was rediscovered by critics after his death,[1] becoming more widely recognized as one of the most important modern French playwrights.[2] This led to many productions overseas, such as the Brazilian version of Music-Hall by Luiz Päetow, which won the Theatre Shell Award in 2010.[4]

In 2015, film director Xavier Dolan adapted Lagarce's Juste la fin du monde into the film It's Only the End of the World,[5] which won the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.[6] Le pays lointain was produced at theatre Odeon, Paris in 2019.