A man around forty, a writer, at night in a hotel room: while his father is in hospital grappling with death, the author reviews his own life. He wants to write a play, a first person fiction, memories of his own origins, the well-protected bourgeois tristesse of his youth, the narrow confinement of his family home. The moment of departure from his family becomes a personal test, marking the end of his youth.

With irony and exaggeration, Richter succeeds in heightening this play to such an extent that ultimately it is no longer the author’s own past that is the central theme of the play but childhood as such, the unequal weight given to intimacy and distance, isolation and sociability. My Secret Garden was a great success at the 2010 Avignon Festival directed by the author and Stanislas Nordey and has since toured throughout France.