The theatrical show scheduled between July 13 and 15 has been cancelled due to medical issues, but the festival schedules a screening of the recorded performance. Personal experiences told through a first-person monologue and a searing social critique are at the heart of the narrative.
“I became a writer because I was angry,” French author Édouard Louis has explained in several interviews. This is clear from reading Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father), written in the form of an angry letter to the author’s father, which combines the personal and the political by bringing together a series of family memories and scathing criticism of the system in which we live. The author’s own biography is the raw material for his books. In this case, the starting point is a visit to his father after a long time apart. The man he finds is completely unrecognisable, broken by his penchant for alcohol, long years of hard work and the consequences of an accident. What has been the role of political decisions, such as spending cuts, in his father’s downfall and that of so many others? The author asks this question in a particularly harsh and intense text that attacks capitalism, portrays social inequality in modern-day France, relives scenes from his upbringing in a working-class family, and reflects the all-pervasive homophobia. The author seeks to show how political history is also personal history and that the decisions made by the president of a country can be as intimate as those between a father and son. The book’s power is evidenced by the fact that it’s been adapted for the stage in recent years by directors as influential as Ivo van Hove himself, Thomas Ostermeier and Italian creators Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini.
This production is a new foray into the world of literature from the director Ivo van Hove at the helm of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam company (the merger of Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam). The Barcelona Grec Festival has seen his stage adaptations of novels such Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in 2014; Louis Couperus’s De stille kracht (The Hidden Force), in 2016; and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was performed in Barcelona in 2019.
Coproduced by deSingel Antwerpen and private producers Bertil van Kaam, Jeroen van Ingen and Jaap Kooijman
Free admission, booking requiered.
Directed, adapted and translated by: Ivo van Hove
Written by: Édouard Louis
Performed by: Hans Kesting
Set and lighting design: Jan Versweyveld
Music: George Dhauw
Costume: An D'Huys
Photography: Jan Versweyveld
