Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father)
Édouard Louis and Thomas Ostermeier
Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre de la Ville Paris
Dunstan Theatre
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

The title of Édouard Louis’s Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father) – which was published as a book in 2018, adapted for the stage in 2019, and given a new adaptation by the author in collaboration with director Thomas Ostermeier in 2020 – conspicuously doesn’t end with a question mark. As Louis makes clear in the text, he knows who killed his father: the French governments of Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron, and the ruling class interests they served and continue to serve. By cutting and restricting access to welfare and disability benefits (and humiliating people who rely on them), those governments and presidents (in Louis's words) ‘broke my father’s back all over again’ after he was crippled by an industrial accident, condemning him to work as a street-cleaner ‘bent over all day and cleaning up other people’s trash’. 

 

In fact, Louis’s father is still alive (at time of writing) but even in his late 50s his health is now so severely compromised by heart disease, diabetes and obesity that (as Louis calmly describes in the show) he can barely breathe or walk, let alone leave the house or work. However, Louis is not just talking about literal death – although as he points out at the start of the play (quoting prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Gilmore) premature mortality is the primary indicator of oppression, whether based on race, class, gender or sexual identity. Rather, his father’s slow but predictably early demise is the symptom of a political and economic system that degrades entire groups of people, including workers, the unemployed and disabled, women, gays, immigrants and people of colour, as well as vast swathes of rural France collectively known as ‘la France profonde’. 

 

In addition to his autobiographical novels, Louis has also edited a book on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose studies on education and social mobility, social and cultural forms of capital, the embodiment and enactment of class and power, class-based dispositions and habits of thought and behaviour, and the symbolic violence imposed by one class on another, are all reflected in Louis’s own writing. The latter (as befits a novelist as well as a playwright, even an autobiographical one) is strongest when dealing with the minutiae of human interaction without undue emotionalising, intellectualizing, imagery or rhetoric. It adopts the rhythms and syntax of everyday speech, and has what Roland Barthes called a ‘colourless’ quality that relies on simple, direct and dispassionate language, and doesn’t get caught up in self-pity. 

 

Ostermeier’s elegantly simple staging emphasizes the domestic aspect of a play that primarily consists of a son’s monologue to an absent father (Kafka is the obvious precursor here). Nina Wetzel’s set design consists of a few items of furniture scattered around the stage: Louis’s writing desk with his laptop and a few piles of books and papers is an upstage anchoring-point to which he repeatedly and compulsively returns; an empty armchair downstage facing away from the audience draws his focus whenever he silently contemplates his father or approaches and speaks to him. 

 

At the back of the stage, Sébastien Dupouey and Marie Sanchez’s large-scale black-and-white video projections provide social context as a kind of backdrop with images of an impoverished rural France, including largely empty highways and streets, semi-abandoned towns and villages, desolate fields and smoke-spewing industrial estates. These are interspersed with occasional family snapshots that are also referred to in the text, including an atypical but revealing photo of his father at some kind of celebration dressed in female clothes, makeup and wig; and an equally crucial photo of Louis himself as an 8-year-old dressed in a party hat, Zorro mask and cape while doing a performance of a Celine Dion song in the family living room (which his father ignored before walking out).

 

Louis’s performance in the show as his adult self is remarkably smooth and accomplished, whether delivering text in mostly quiet, undramatic tones, or breaking out into alternately exuberant or desperately attention-seeking lip-synched dance routines to 90s pop songs. These memorably include Britney Spears’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ and Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ – the latter in homage to his father, who reluctantly bought him a VHS of The Bodyguard as a childhood birthday present.

 

Ostermeier has Louis using microphones, either hand-held or on stands, which are variously positioned around the stage, including on his desk and nestled in his father’s armchair. While something of a stylistic tic in contemporary German theatre, the device here supports Louis’s intimate tone of delivery while also ironically reinforcing the sense that he’s using a public persona which is to some extent constructed, even when he is ‘playing himself’ (much like the pop stars he lip-synchs, in fact). 

 

The text is in French (with surtitles in English superimposed on the video).  The only exception is a crucial section – which is addressed to the audience rather than to his father – involving an outbreak of family violence, betrayal and complicity on the part of Louis himself, which becomes a kind of confessional, and which he announces will be easier if he tells it to us in English.

 

Louis is at his strongest when writing about his relationships with his father and other members of his family. Here the text has great sociological and psychological acuity, especially when dealing with his father’s toxic masculinity and alcoholism; his mother’s passive aggressiveness and resentment; his parents’ shared homophobia; and his brother’s substance abuse and propensity for violence. There’s also a shift in his father’s attitude later in life towards his son’s sexuality and politics, which suggests some kind of partial reconciliation – although this development is cut short in the final section of the play, which reverts to an attack on individual politicians, and a closing call for ‘revolution’, followed by an abrupt blackout. 

In doing so, Louis abandons the complex story of his relationship with his father and family, in favour of a simplistic, demonstrative and histrionic diatribe that sacrifices his best qualities as a writer and performer. Ostermeier’s staging of this sequence – with Louis donning the party hat, mask and cape of his childhood, pinning up images of the offending politicians on a washing line and throwing handfuls of magic dust at them – is intentionally regressive. It’s as if Louis abandons the attempt to win his father’s love only to install Chirac, Sarkozy and Co. as surrogates, so he can rebel against them in a childish act of insurrection that falls far short of revolution, despite the play’s final rallying cry.

 

Louis’s definition of politics in the play as ‘the government of some people by other people’ confuses the structural notion of class with the empirical existence of social groups. This has its theoretical and practical limits, as the successes and failures of populism on the Left and Right around the world have demonstrated. So-called representatives of la France profonde (from farmers to truck drivers) have taken to the streets of Paris in recent years to contest the legitimacy of the so-called ‘urban elites’ – and have been championed not only by the populist Left but also the far Right. Such movements of protest – and even insurrection – have been co-opted by a politics of resentment and tribalism that continues to serve the interests of the ruling class. As such, it's a form of anti-politics that pits one group of people against another while ‘business as usual’ rolls on, leaving the underlying structures of class and power fundamentally intact.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. 

 

Professor von Flügelhorn is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations),Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.