It was the German stage manager Thomas Ostermeier who encouraged the French writer and activist Édouard Louis to take the stage to speak his own words, the words he had written in his autobiographical bullet point play History of violence in 2018.
Now he is back with another book of his, also loaded with autobiography, Qui a tué mon père (Who killed my father, More Books / Salamandra), where the young writer tells the story of his family, with a father worker, from the extreme right, who kept repeating that "the ladybugs must be killed". The play is presented today and tomorrow at El Canal, in Salt, as part of the Temporada 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 audience. I had done amateur theater before in high school, a lot, but never in a professional way."
"The theater 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 ladybug and I had no friends. I wanted to be loved and that's why I signed up for all the activities when I was in high school, even if I didn't like comics, or calligraphy... Until someone started a theater group, even though that he hadn't read anything about theater".
"Since then it has been part of my life and I would even say it is part of many homosexuals, because we pretend to like many things that make up masculinity, like girls, beer or football. Being gay is like being a forced actor."
"When Ostermeier told me to go on stage, I thought I owed the theater a debt 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 this reason, to change this image of the writer. And he added: 'David Bowie would have done it'", he concludes.
