In a perpetual present constructed by Florian Zeller, life flows between the real present, the unpredictable future, and the inexhaustible past. The play Avant de s’envoler is like a chiaroscuro painting, where light pierces the interval between absence and presence. Drawn continually toward the uncertain of the future, André, Madeleine, Anne, Élise, and Madame Schwartz find themselves in this in-between space, gazing toward a present intensely lived not long ago, trapped in a suspended time where everything already seems decided.
In the obscurity of night, the characters bring forth light: family meals shared together, whispered confessions meant not to wound the other, hopes declared and sometimes left unfulfilled, mistakes made, anger or disappointment, and, not least, the overflowing love shared between the dearest. The further the characters drift away from present reality, the stronger become the past moments that once bound them together. The play traces this ambivalent and tense duration between symbiosis and separation.
Subtly overturned, the flow of time no longer allows the characters to rush toward becoming, toward fulfilment, toward resolution, but only toward a return to a present multiplied through moments in which life was fully lived—through flashes of intensity that surface like seismic tremors, defying any logic. Parents discover themselves through their children, who become their revealers, just as children discover themselves by reliving a reversed present, as though in a book that gains meaning only once it has already been read. Avant de s’envoler is a continuous, repeated return to a multiplied NOW.