A comedy by Jean-Pierre Martinez
Translation by the author
You all know that famous website facilitating the reunion with long-lost schoolmates… Unfortunately, nostalgia nights can also turn into nightmares. Having invited over to his place two of his « best buddies » from high school whom he hasn’t seen since graduation, a friendly loser triggers their unexpected reunion with a girl who has some unresolved issues with them…
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The song from the play. Lyrics and music Jean-Pierre Martinez. This song may be used as part of a stage production, simple request to the author and without any additional fees. The audio file is available upon request, subject to prior authorization from the author for the use of the play’s text.
When a Reunion Turns into a Reckoning…
Fifteen years after leaving school, Nicolas brings together Antoine and Vincent, two former classmates he has barely seen since. An actor whose career has never really taken off, he wants to persuade them to revive a play they wrote as teenagers but never finished because it was never performed. To complete the cast, he has also tracked down Brigitte, the only girl in their class, who mysteriously disappeared before the final exams. What was meant to be a nostalgic reunion soon brings back a past far less innocent than the three men’s fond memories had suggested.
The play is built around a highly theatrical mechanism of lies, assumed roles and truths gradually brought to light. Nicolas stages his own impending death in order to force his old friends to perform with him again; Brigitte, for her part, first invents a prestigious career and then raises the possibility of an unexpected paternity in order to confront Antoine and Vincent with the people they once were. Each character thus becomes an actor in front of the others, at the very moment when they claim to be reconnecting with a time when they all dreamed of becoming actors.
Beneath the conventions of boulevard comedy and the accumulation of misunderstandings, the play takes a sharper look at nostalgia. The famous “good old days” gradually appear as a convenient reconstruction: what the boys remember as harmless teenage jokes remains, for Brigitte, the humiliating memory of a young woman they took advantage of without ever trying to know her. Her return reverses the balance of power and turns the friendly reunion into a settling of scores, without the play ever ceasing to exploit the bad faith and cowardice of each character for comic effect.
This constant movement between fiction and reality gives the play its true coherence. The characters lie in order to make others perform, then eventually agree to go back on stage together; and just when every deception seems to have been exposed, the fake tragedy invented by Nicolas suddenly threatens to become real. The ending thus pushes the play’s central principle to its limit: after playing with reality for so long, the characters are no longer quite sure where the performance ends.