Surrogate Productions: Who Killed My Father
Traverse Theatre - 11/05/23
by Édouard Louis | Adapted and Directed for stage by Nora Wardell | Theatre Company Surrogate
The most admirable thing in this show is the actor, Michael Marcus. Speaking with great clarity and variety of tone, moving lithely about the area, he engages the audience’s sympathies. Playing a homosexual there is no fake campness in his style, just a certain delicacy in his gestures. The story in brief is of a boy, Édouard, growing up in remote provincial France with an aggressively macho father who hates the boy’s lack of masculinity. The father has a work accident which incapacitates him but brings about a gradual change in his attitude towards his son. It’s a one-man show with Édouard addressing the audience who, in a sense, stand in for the father.
The script is adapted from a novel; attempts to transcend that origin don’t quite get off the ground. It remains very wordy. A range of props are used but without great impact. A white screen is there for some shadow play (Marcus gives us a couple of fine moments of dancing in silhouette). Édouard places two chairs side by side behind the screen representing his mother and brother watching TV; they remain in the frame till the end with no apparent relevance to what’s going on.
A twist in the story line: the father, having suffered a broken back, is then obliged, by cuts in his benefits, to go back to work sweeping the streets, both humiliating and painful. On this I found it hard to suspend disbelief; perhaps Imisunderstood something. He is obliged to work longer hours, though, as far as I know, French manual workers have one of the shortest working weeks in the world.
Which leads to my main source of discomfort. The show is framed by aggressive fuzzy politics. It opens with a quotation about racism from a socio-political writer, making me expect something like an academic lecture. Racism, as far as I could gather, does not feature in the rest of the show. Towards the end Edouard sticks pictures of eight leading French politicians to the white screen, accusing them of causing his father’s suffering. He calls these members of the “ruling class” murderers. During this diatribe Édouard sports a gilet jaune though without mentioning it overtly. The last sentence in the script: “What we need is a revolution”. Perhaps so. Have things in France not moved on since 1789?
The human story of the father-son relationship and other troubled family interactions is more coherent, encapsulated in a powerful line: “Is it normal to be afraid of loving?”
