Qui a tue mon pere (Who Killed My Father)
Director Thomas Ostermeier,
Writer & Performer Édouard Louis,
Video Sébastien Dupouey & Marie Sanchez, Stage
Designer Nina Wetzel, Costume Designer Caroline Tavernier, Composer Sylvain Jacques
Dramaturg Florian Borchmeyer & Elisa Leroy, Production/Dramaturg Elisa Leroy & Anne Arnz, Lighting Designer Erich Schneider,
Photos © Jean-Louis
Fernandez. Schaubuehne Berlin and Theatre de
la Ville Paris. Dunstan Playhouse. Adelaide Festival Centre. Adelaide
Festival 24. March 8-10 2024.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
Edouard Louis sits at a laptop at the rear of the stage. For anyone who may not have read his memoir, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s statement projected upon the screen behind him should have offered a clue to the tenor of Louis’s book and the Schaubuehne production with the Theatre de la Ville.
“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” States Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It serves as a portent to be heeded.This is not solely confined to racism. Its pernicious attitude can be directed at homosexuals, like Louis, at the poor like his mother and father and brother, at the workers like those at the factory where his father worked and at any who through their own misfortune look to the state and the law for support. Qui a tue mon pere? appears at first to be a young man’s account of the relationship with a distant father. It is the child’s desperate need for affection. It is his search for attention and longing for acceptance.
Under Thomas Ostermeier’s fluid and purposeful direction, Louis lives out his life on stage and before
the empty chair in which his father always sat. He would play out Aqua’s Barbie Girl with no response. He would
let loose before an unresponsive father with Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You from his
favourite film The Bodyguard, which
ironically after much pleading his father finally gave him. It is a vexed and
complex relationship, played out against
the backdrop of rural landscapes, poor French villages and the smoking stacks
of the industrial region. It is the landscape of poverty, of the working class and
of the state’s disadvantaged. It is the
land of the prejudiced against foreigners and faggots. Louis guides us through the
struggles of a people marginalized and ignored. 
Edouard Louis in Qui a tue mon pere
When a steel container falls
on Louis’s father at the factory where he works, damaging his back and leaving
him bedridden, the full significance of his father’s incapacity becomes cruelly
apparent. Louis’s father becomes the discarded and the derided. He is forced to
work as a street cleaner, bearing the pain in order to satisfy the state’s
demands. It is here that Ostermeier and Louis turn the domestic drama into a
political and social expose, a furious outrage against the elite and the
privileged the powerful and the influencers. Louis has discarded his Barbie
outfit of his childhood for a superhero’s mask and cape to battle the
oppressors. He and his father are united in their grievance. In an ultimate
final condemnation, Louis reveals the state’s actions in removing benefits,
changing working conditions, removing support for victims of industrial
accidents, forcing people back into the labour market and providing tax cuts to
the wealthy. Neither Ostermeier nor Louis stoke the rage. There is no need. As
Louis cites each unjust act he pins up the photos of the Presidents and Health
Ministers from Jaques Chirac to Emanuel Macron who have made his father’s life
unbearable. “ Why are their names never named?” he asks.
Qui a tue mon pere (Who killed my father??is a powerful and moving indictment of a society built on wealth and privilege and not compassion and humanity. It has been caringly and poignantly directed by Ostermeier. It does not brandish the flaming torch of outrage. It is for the audience to carry that forward with the father’s final words ringing in their ears, “We need a revolution.”
