Tan solo el fin del mundo

Israel Elejalde is the director of Tan solo el fin del mundo, with a text by Jean-Luc Lagarce. This author discovered that he had contracted HIV right before writing this work in Berlin 1990. At that time, and apart from being an illness with considerable rates of mortality, this virus meant a huge stigma pointed at the ill person. Autobiographical elements are present from the beginning. Nevertheless, this work has not just an autobiographical character. It is not even a work entirely about death. Family is the central element of this play as the atmosphere that conditions our development both through confirmation and through rejection. 

Louis has run away his family for years. He abandoned them. He escapes looking for a fresh new life away from the family that raised him. But after receiving the news of his imminent death, he decides to go back home as the prodigal son to reveal his death. He doesn’t know what he is really looking for: maybe to close a cycle? The forgiveness for his absence? The affection of those he had previously rejected, but who will nevertheless continue to be faithful to him during his last days? Or maybe the reencounter with that lost paradise that childhood represents? 

Finally, Louis is not going to make his announcement, but he will give his family the opportunity to express the real significance of his absence and the pain caused by it.