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Yet no one seems to have been seeing clearly.
Cutting the intermediary was a mistake; in performance, theres magic in the middleman.
Louis has been a respected author and public intellectual since his early 20s.
Louis also knows specific people made those back-to-work policies, so he names names.
He pins their pictures up on a clothesline and throws exploding caps at them.
These literal fireworks come only in the final, relatively brief section of the piece, however.
But Ostermeiers show turns the script from pathos to bathos.
Now, this is right out of Cliche 101, specifically the class on pathetic fallacy.
Why must they underline and emphasize Louiss sadness this ham-handed way?
Fog is fine!Stubble in a field is perfectly natural.
In this he explicitly draws a line from his fathers inhibitions to his current freedom.
The lines get more overt.
His father has lived in a gray town, never visiting the nearby sea, Louis says.
Eventually, a black-and-white video clip plays on the wall of Edouard dancing in slow-motion in the surf.Get it?
Its not appealing, this use of a human being.
Tu as raison,his father supposedly said to him at the very end, accepting his revolutionary politics.
Now Edouard Louis will repeat that validation for show after show, tour stop after tour stop.
It sounds despite his overt fury with the French politicians like the core act of revenge here.
On the page, in the book, theres only a hint of this moral shadow.
A readers inner voice also transmits Louiss own anguish better than he can do as a performer.
Its another fallacy, though.
The more you wait for emotion to rush in, the more it ebbs away, away, away.
Who Killed My Fatheris at St. Anns Warehouse through June 5.
