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Social Injustice

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00631

1537-9477

Paul David Young,

French Urban and Social Studies

Qui a tué mon père [Who Killed My Father], a performance by Édouard Louis, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY, May 18–June 5, 2022.Édouard Louis tells the tragedy of his father’s life in Qui a tué mon père [Who Killed My Father], the story of a French factory worker born in the provinces and doomed to die there through his own seemingly inevitable life choices. While admittedly America’s hardcore viewers of Fox News are unlikely to see the performance, this is their story en français. It is compelling and radically pertinent to world politics, and its stage recreation, with Louis playing himself, relies on that strength in its simple means of presentation.The French-language work is a co-production of Théâtre de la Ville Paris and Berlin’s Schaubühne, one of that city’s premiere venues, which has consistently produced fearless contemporary theatre, and where Thomas Ostermeier has been a director and member of the artistic management since 1999. Louis’s A History of Violence, documenting the night he was raped repeatedly and almost murdered, an incident compounded afterward by the trauma of multiple police interrogations, had been presented by Ostermeier and the Schaubühne in Berlin before St. Ann’s hosted it in 2019. Four actors playing multiple roles animated that story.In Qui a tué mon père, as a solo performer of his own story, Louis has to carry the entire show with almost nothing in the way of props or set design. Ostermeier has given him only a desk with a laptop and some nondescript chairs, a trio of mikes scattered around, an empty padded recliner to represent his absent father, and a video screen the size of the stage. The predominantly black-and-white video projections of grim, unpopulated landscapes devoted to moving vehicles presumably are intended to indicate the cold remoteness of Louis’s hometown or the French provinces in general. The repetitive footage is largely characterless, with nonspecific views of or from one featureless highway after another. Louis dances in the surf in one video, an exception to the general monotony of the background projections.He moves around the stage, talking into the different microphones, sitting in the recliner, wrapping himself in a blanket, and dancing. Except for the moment he dips into drag, he wears either a plain hoodie or an orange Pokémon t-shirt. Much of the time, he is seated at the table, behind the laptop. It was unclear whether this part of the staging was meant to display the act of creation of the text, or if it merely allowed Louis to read from the screen.The text is a love letter of sorts to his father, who was ruined by so many things beyond his control. It expresses a love that could never live itself out in their lives, except in the interstices. It is a love that is born of the sadness that Louis feels, the empathy for a man he could by rights hate. Throughout, Louis uses the informal second person singular familiar pronoun, tu, which creates two kinds of intimacy here, one between him and his father and another between him and his audience. Though the latter is never invoked explicitly, the grammatical choice causes an engagement and familiarity to arise in the performance that might not be present were Louis to have simply referred to his father as “him.”Louis, now aged twenty-nine, leapt from his provincial, working-class background into the center of the French intellectual world, accepted at both the École Normale Supérieure and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, two of France’s most exclusive educational institutions. He edited Pierre Bourdieu. L’insoumission en héritage [Pierre Bourdieu: A Heritage of Rebellion], a collection of writings about the highly influential sociologist, historian, philosopher, and theorist who, like Louis, came from a humble background.In the opening lines of Qui a tué mon père, Louis portrays his father as the most loathsome of creatures, grotesquely obese, unable to walk or bathe without assistance, certain to die during the night unless he is hooked up to a respirator and parked in a landscape described as “ugly and gray.” His father is just past fifty years old, and death has already come knocking in the form of diabetes and many other ailments. To this repulsive physical presence, Louis adds the dismaying recollection of how uncommunicative and threatening his father had been during Louis’s childhood. He describes his regular anxiety when coming home from school because he feared that his father might be there, and the relief he always felt whenever his father’s car was not parked outside their house. That meant that his father would be gone for hours, perhaps all night, drinking with friends. It was safe to go inside.Thus far, this portrait is a revolting stereotype, but Louis’s prematurely aged father has an unlikely past, one in which he was known as a stylish dancer who bathed in the limelight, one in which he was photographed in drag, one in which he chased Louis’s mother and brought her chocolates and flowers until she relented and said yes to his insistent proposals of marriage. How this bon vivant changed into a lump of morbidity is the story Louis tells. The tale emerges in small, perplexing glimpses from the past. Louis sees his father weep discreetly while watching opera on television—this father, who said that men don’t cry. In the car once, Louis tells his father to drive like a Formula One racer, and his grinning papa floors it. One Christmas, a reckless truck driver smashes into the car parked outside their house—where his father ritually hides Christmas presents on Christmas Eve—thus destroying the family car and any chance of a Christmas. After the truck driver flees the scene, Louis watches his father futilely running after the truck, overcome by anger, irrational, helpless, and defeated. Louis’s response: “It often seems to me that I love you.”Though they had rough times, Louis also recalls his father playfully swatting his mother on the behind and addressing her with a bouquet of terms of endearment. He also evokes moments when his father was fantastically tender toward him. He remembers his father’s absolute refusal to get him the VHS of Titanic that he demanded for his birthday, and then how his father relents and the video—the deluxe box set, wrapped lovingly in special paper—magically appeared in his room on the day. Louis also recounts how he and some friends had prepared a song-and-dance number to present at a family party at their house, and his father resolutely refuses to watch, eventually marching angrily outside during Louis’s drag lip-sync performance. But in the end, his father takes Louis in his arms, not explaining anything, but telling him it doesn’t matter, that nothing’s wrong.Louis’s mother eventually kicks his father out of the house, having had enough of his unruly behavior, packing the father’s clothes in a trash bag and tossing it onto the street. His mother then recovers from the vast unhappiness of her marriage and finds a good life in cities beyond the confines she has known, enjoying herself finally after so many years of suffering. For his father, the marital dissolution is the beginning of the end.Louis reconstructs, in brief strokes, how his father was compelled to forge his fatal masculinity growing up in a working-class environment, and how that social compulsion also led to his devolution, forcing him to leave school as early as possible in order to make a gender-conforming statement about the effeminacy of education and to take a swing at the ruling class. His father runs off to the South of France and makes his living by stealing mopeds; he spends the money carousing and drinking his way through the night. After five years, he returns to the same dreary hometown and the same dreary fate that was always waiting for him. This self-defeating rebellion sets the course for his father’s chaotic life and is presented as one of his killers.The other assailants are explicitly named, all presidents of France, from Jacques Chirac onwards—Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, and Emmanuel Macron—alongside their respective ministers. He suffers a debilitating workplace injury, where his spine is crushed, and he recovers slowly and only partially. Louis’s father then has his public assistance reduced, and is made to pay out-of-pocket for his medications, and is finally forced into an unaffordable daily commute to a neighboring city where he is required to shovel garbage from the public streets in a French version of workfare. Toward the end of the show, Louis uses pins to hang pictures of the responsible officials along a clothesline that he has strung across the stage, expressing his fury at the politicians by tossing small fireworks that pop and sparkle at their pictures. (He avoids the fact that his father is reportedly still alive, though not well.)The text moves back and forth in time, rather abruptly, which can work well in storytelling, but here the logic of these narrative jumps is not always made apparent. In between the pieces, placed out of time, there are frequent musical interludes. Typical of German theatre, they feature English-language pop music. Louis reenacts how he lip-synced and danced for his father and his friends; at other moments he dances and lip-syncs to other pop tunes, including, of course, the theme song from Titanic. Although the common thread of Louis’s rendition of his father’s miserable life ties it all together, the pieces seem inscrutably jumbled together at times.Graciously nodding to the needs of the mostly English-speaking audience at St. Ann’s, Louis re-performed part of the text in an English that, to my American ear, was charmingly accented yet thoroughly fluent. It raised the question of why he was performing in French at all, since he clearly could have done the entire show in English and, perhaps, drawn his audience closer to him, making the performance more intimate than the sterile production design had permitted by itself.The story of Louis’s father, as Louis makes plain in the concluding segments of the piece, illustrates the victimization of the working class by increasingly right-sympathetic governments that roll back workers’ rights and adjust other levers that had kept French and other semi-socialist Europeans in an enduring postwar lifestyle. For many, these measures approximated the living conditions of the middle class, affording a bandwidth of social cohesion and wellbeing that could be equitably shared. The reforms of the French welfare state fell upon his father like successive plagues: Louis links the changes to his father’s ability to obtain government assistance and subsidized medical care and the consequences for his father’s health. Hollande asphyxiated him, Macron took the food out of his mouth, Chirac destroyed his intestines, Sarkozy broke his back. Representations of the diseased lungs and intestines and broken spine are ultimately placed along the clothesline at the back of the stage. It is an indictment of the French political establishment as a whole and, like his father’s ill health, a story of sequential failures.The dubious privilege of Louis’s working-class origin surely authenticates his assessment of the society into which he and his father were born, and the overwhelming obstacles that their social position necessarily posed for them in choosing how to live their lives. Louis’s voice, his own live voice in this production, speaks in a language of love and empathy, to be sure, while applying his native intellect and his ultra-elite education to articulate the social and political landscape and identify his father’s killers by name and function. I suspect that Louis and Ostermeier will team up again to explore this territory in which a worldwide battle for democracy and social justice is now being waged.