Who Killed My Father by Édouard Lous (review)
2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tj.2023.a908746
ISSN1086-332X
Tópico(s)Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research
ResumoReviewed by: Who Killed My Fatherby Édouard Lous Aubrey Gabel WHO KILLED MY FATHER. By Édouard Lous. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. St. Ann's Warehouse, New York. May 26and June 4. When I saw Édouard Louis's Qui a tué mon père( Who Killed My Father) at Saint Ann's Warehouse on May 26 thand June 4 th, 2022, I did not expect to see a drag show. At every scene break, Édouard Louis, who played himself in Thomas Ostermeier's Schaubühne adaptation, donned minimalist attire—a wig, a jean skirt, a Pokémon shirt, or a cape—and danced his heart out to a millennial, coming-of-age soundtrack: Aqua's "Barbie Girl," Britney Spears's "Hit Me Baby One More Time," or Céline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." With every song, Louis joyfully and awkwardly shimmied on stage, living out a childhood dream by performing for a fatherly surrogate: an overstuffed chair with a plaid blanket. Louis hammed it up for the daddies in the audience, miming Britney and Céline's iconic choreography and improvising knee slides and twirls; at my first viewing, a middle-aged audience member even hooted encouragement. The effect was nothing if not dissonant, as the play itself is an extended soliloquy, in which Louis relies on ambiguous childhood memories—like kids staging an informal pageant or finding a photograph of his father in drag—to investigate his relationship with his working-class father. Addressing his father directly, Louis laments the former's many physical ailments, beginning with a work-related back injury that prevented him from walking, much less working reliably. After a detailed description of an " éventration" ("eventration" or literally "disemboweling")—a medical term for when the abdominal wall can no longer contain the viscera within—a drag-style dance-along felt almost perverse. Louis wrote Who Killed My Fatherat the behest of Stanislas Nordey, a former actor and artistic and pedagogical director, who currently directs the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. The play came not long after Louis had skyrocketed to international fame, after writing two autobiographical novels, Pour en finir avec Eddy Bellegueule(Seuil, 2014; The End of Eddy, translated by Michael Lucey, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017), which narrates his life as a gay youth in rural France, and his controversial Histoire de la violence(Seuil, 2016; History of Violence, translated by Lorin Stein, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), which recounts Louis's own experience of sexual assault, when an Algerian man (specifically a Kabyle, a Berber ethnic group) he had taken home returned to rape him. Born in 1992 in Hallencourt, a commune in northern France, Louis grew up in semi-rural poverty, only to rise through the ranks of the notoriously stratified French school system. Under the tutelage of the French sociologist and philosopher Didier Eribon, Louis became a star student and celebrity intellectual. He has since edited a volume devoted to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; penned manifestos along with his partner, the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie; and marched alongside Assa Traoré, the face of the Black Lives Matter Movement in France. Most recently, he has published Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme(Seuil, 2021, Battles and Metamorphoses of a Woman, translation by Tash Aw, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022), a companion novel to Who Killed My Father, which tells his mother's life story. In the pre-pandemic half of the 2019–2020 season, the New York theatre scene was experiencing a Louis adaptation frenzy. The UK's Unicorn Theater staged Pamela Carter and Steward Laing's adaptation of The End of Eddyat Brooklyn Academy of Music in November, while Ostermeier's German-language adaptation of History of Violenceappeared at St. Ann's Warehouse in November and December. When Who Killed My Fatherpremiered at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts in September, Nordey himself played Louis. But unlike Louis, Nordey was abysmally solemn, delivering each line laboriously, as if the text were composed of alexandrines to be plummed for all their metaphysical depth. For two hours without intermission, Nordey conversed with a life-sized rubber puppet on a mostly empty set...
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