It was the German stage director Thomas Ostermeier who encouraged the French writer and activist Édouard Louis to go on stage to say his own words, the words he had written in his autobiographical work History of Violence, in 2018.
Now he has returned with another book of his, also loaded with autobiography, Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father, Salamandra / Més Llibres), where the young writer tells the story of his family, with a working-class, extreme right-wing father , who kept repeating that “sissies have to be killed.” The work is presented today and tomorrow at El Canal, in Salt, within the Montaña Alta festival. Ostermeier directs and Louis performs: he talks, sings and dances.
“With Ostermeier – declares the writer – we agreed that we wanted to make a kind of theater that was more political, more committed, and that confronted the public. “I had done amateur theater before in high school, a lot, but never professional.”
“Theatre has allowed me to free myself from my past,” he continues. I spent my childhood in a family that rejected me because I was gay, I was effeminate. At school they called me a sissy and I had no friends. "I was looking to be loved and that's why I signed up for all the activities when I was in high school, even though I didn't like comics or calligraphy... Until someone created a theater group, even though I hadn't read anything about theater."
“Since then it has been part of my life and I would even say that it is part of many homosexuals, because we pretend that we like many things that make up masculinity, like girls, beer or football. Being gay is like being a forced actor.”
“When Ostermeier asked me to go on stage I thought I owed a debt to the theater and that's why I accepted. But I was afraid of losing credibility as a writer and as a politician. And he told me that I had to do it precisely for that reason, to change that image of the writer. And he added: 'Bowie would have done it,'” he concludes.
Catalan version, here
