So Far, So Good: Living to the End Despite the Certainty of Shipwreck

Borrowing from the sitcom its single setting, recurring characters and episodic structure, the play turns the retirement home into a small society governed by waiting. The criminal plot and the promise of a cruise disrupt its routines without altering the destination shared by all: above all, they reveal the energy with which the residents continue to desire, compete and defend their place. The gallery of residents thus becomes a collective character, irreducible to the passive image so often associated with old age.

The black humour does not target old age itself, but rather the managerial language that reduces human lives to beds, costs and rankings. The parallel between waiting lists for nurseries and those for retirement homes sketches a society that manages individuals from their arrival to their departure. The metaphor of the ship reminds us that everyone is bound for the same shipwreck, though not everyone travels under the same conditions. The residents do not hope to avoid it: by continuing to laugh, desire and conspire, they assert their right to live fully to the end rather than consent to dying in advance.