In 2018, after Finish with Eddy Bellegueule and history of violence, Édouard Louis signs a third novel, who killed my father, a brief text that aroused the interest of directors such as Stanislas Nordey and Thomas Ostermeier. These days, at the Quat’Sous, it is the turn of Jérémie Niel, at the head of the Pétrus company since 2005, to bring to the stage this poignant monologue which could have been called The story of your suffering.
In 1919, in his letter to the father, Kafka dissects the conflicting relationship he has had with his father since childhood. The situation of Édouard Louis is very different, as is his time and his society, but we find in the two addresses to the father this ambition to define the complex nature of the bond, this desire to bear witness to resentment while letting the love, this visceral need to express recriminations while expressing gratitude. “It often seems to me that I love you,” Édouard blurts out.
political intimate
The show opens in the kitchen of the modest apartment that the writer’s father, his back crushed and short of breath, now lives alone in the north of France. While the son revisits various episodes of his childhood, the father listens in silence. Violence serves as a red thread, that which the son suffered in the village of Picardy where he grew up, but also that which society generally reserves for women, the poor and homosexuals. Édouard Louis practices autofiction, delves into his memories, often painful, but not always, to reiterate how intimate is political, to denounce with conviction the relationships of domination on which our civilizations are founded.
If the nearly two-hour show oozes intelligence, it’s because Jérémie Niel demonstrates his deep understanding of the text while deploying his unique and fruitful aesthetic. With his designers, starting with the very gifted Cédric Delorme-Bouchard in scenography and lighting, the director carves out radically different movements in the work, gives birth to tableaux whose thematic, visual and sound contrasts express the richness of the father-son relationship, directs a fascinating ballet of attractions and repulsions.
The influence of children
At the heart of this device which takes us from hyperrealism to fantasy, from materiality to immateriality, from the banal to the spiritual, from chiaroscuro to the dark and misty night, we find a voice, amplified like this is the custom with Niel, and two tortured bodies. Without uttering a single word, Martin Faucher is far from fading away, deploying a vast vocabulary of gestures. Filling the space with words, Félix-Antoine Boutin does not demonstrate the technical mastery that the score demands, but he certainly does not lack accuracy or presence.
Between the two actors, the current passes. So much so that, in the last minutes of the show, when the resemblance between father and son crystallizes, but also the influence of the courageous actions of the son on the destiny of the father, we hold our breath. “You changed overnight,” said Edouard. “One of my friends says that it’s the children who transform their parents, and not the other way around. »