»Throughout my entire childhood, I hoped you’d disappear.« — The disgust with which he regards his violent, alcoholic, rightwing father, whose homophobic outbursts traumatised him for life as he was growing up gay in the French provinces, lies deep in Édouard Louis. But when, in his most recent text, the French writer confronts his now seriously ill father, his anger is transformed into compassion: »You can no longer get behind the wheel, are no longer allowed to drink, can no longer shower unaidid without it presenting an enormous risk. You´re just over fifty. You belong to the precise category of people for whom politics has envisaged a premature death.« The apparent perpetrator has become a victim. His propensity for violence now appears to be more a consequence of continuously suffered humiliation and social brutality. Using the broken body of his father as a starting point, Louis undertakes a defiant rewrite of the recent political and social history of France. It is a chronicle of an ongoing murder, of a deliberate mutilation by neo-liberal »reforms« and their brutality against the workers who are forced to experience their consequences in their own bodies. A polemical and rebellious pamphlet against forgetting, exclusion and the physical violence of a classridden society — and, at the same time, an intimate declaration of love to a person who makes it almost impossible to love him.

Following their collaboration on the adaptation of his novel »Im Herzen der Gewalt« (»History of Violence«), Édouard Louis, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, is appearing for the first time as a performer in one of his own works.