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Édouard Louis Would Like to

Talk About Theater Now
The French wunderkind’s books have quickly become magnets
for the stage. Adaptations of “History of Violence” and “The End
of Eddy” will play New York simultaneously.

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“There is probably something theatrical in my writing,” says Édouard Louis, “because it’s part of me.”
Benjamin Malapris for The New York Times

By Joshua Barone

Nov. 6, 2019

Édouard Louis was relieved to be talking about something else.

Journalists will often ask about politics, since Louis — a

wunderkind of French literature who at 27 has already risen to the
status of public intellectual — is seen as a firebrand of the left and a
voice for the Yellow Vests movement. Or they’ll want to know
about his life, which he has documented with fierce and unflinching
honesty in three novels about sexuality, class and cruelty.

“People are always more interested in the biographical stuff,” he

said, adding with a laugh, “but I’m constantly writing about my
life!”

Hence his happiness at a change of subject. This conversation, with

yet another journalist, would be focused on theater: one of his first
and most enduring loves, even the wellspring of his creative life.

His books have become magnets for stage adaptations — two of

which, “History of Violence” and “The End of Eddy,” are traveling
to New York this month. The productions, in an unheard-of
collaboration between St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, have been planned for nearly simultaneous
openings: “History of Violence” at St. Ann’s Nov. 13 through Dec. 1,
and “The End of Eddy” at BAM Nov. 14-21. (Both presenters will
also host a talk with the novelist at BAM Fisher on Nov. 11.)

Louis doesn’t exactly know why so many directors have wanted to

adapt his work, but he has one theory: “There is probably
something theatrical in my writing,” he said, “because it’s part of
me.”

After all, he is gay; and every gay person, Louis thinks, is a born
actor. As the child of a working-class family — his name was Eddy
Bellegueule back then — in a northern French town of less than
1,500 people, he would drink beer, talk about soccer or make fun of
girls. Every day, he said, was a performance, “to protect myself
from homophobia and masculine violence.”

His first escape from this life — documented with rage and
unsparing detail in “The End of Eddy,” a coming-of-age roman à
clef published when Louis was 21 — was being admitted to a
theater program at a school in the nearby, but much larger, city of
Amiens. Acting, he found, came easily, and he felt that the applause
he received began to drown out the vicious slurs that had followed
him throughout childhood.

Theater also made him read. The same toxic mannerisms of his
masculine performance at home — a brazenly poor diet, and a
refusal to compensate with proper dental hygiene — had also kept
him away from books. “Reading, for my father, was considered a
way of losing your time,” Louis recalled, “and effeminate.”

But dramatic literature offered an entry point, especially to

canonical French classics by Molière and Racine. Every school
year also included field trips to productions at the local theaters.
One was Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” — whose subtitle
alone, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” is enough to make a
closeted boy nervous around his classmates. Louis lasted one hour
before walking out.

“I stood up, and I said, ‘I don’t want to see this faggot thing,’” he
recalled. “This play was confronting me with things that I had been
trying to hide for so many years. It was too violent for me to see.”

He was called homophobic afterward; he welcomed the label with

pride. “It made me less gay,” he said, “but I was full of shame. It’s
one of my biggest regrets.”

If there’s a silver lining to that day, it’s that Louis also realized the
power of theater not only to entertain, but also agitate. “The fact
that I was uncomfortable was very emancipatory,” he said. “I
wouldn’t be the same person today if I had not felt uncomfortable.”

Discomfort, indeed, has become his weapon of choice; like Bertolt

Brecht reincarnate, Louis and his writing are often in combat with
the bourgeois audience that has embraced and elevated him. And,
knowing they’re at the stage adaptations of his books, he said, “I
want to confront people with things that they precisely don’t want
to see.”

Louis has been especially sensitive to class since moving to Paris

in 2011 — a complicated, and irreversible, life change. He was
admitted to a prestigious school in what is often treated as the only
city that matters in France, far from the factory life and welfare
reliance of his childhood.

“I learned to be gay in Paris,” he said. Through his mentor Didier

Eribon, whom he had met in Amiens, he was introduced to a true
community. He came to love opera. He read the books of James
Baldwin and the poems of Allen Ginsberg, and saw the films of Gus
Van Sant. He changed his name to Édouard Louis (inspired by
Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play “It’s Only the End of the World.”)

“There was a whole history, and I was suddenly fascinated by it,”

Louis said. “There were all these people who fought to make my
body possible.”

Laurenz Laufenberg as Édouard in Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “History of Violence.” Arno Declair

But Paris is also where, in 2012, he was raped at gunpoint inside his
apartment — which became the subject of his harrowing second
novel, “History of Violence.” The autofictional book, which like
“The End of Eddy” courted both praise and controversy, is an
indictment of a justice system unfit for either a gay man like him or
his attacker (Reda, who is Kabyle from Algeria); it also wrestles
with the nature of truth and storytelling, with a plot relayed as
memory, overheard conversation and, at times, the imagined
biographies of others.

Among the novel’s fans was the director Thomas Ostermeier —

whom Louis met through Eribon, and who had adapted Eribon’s
“Returning to Reims” for the Schaubühne in Berlin. (That
production also traveled to St. Ann’s.)

“History of Violence,” Ostermeier said, is “very theatrical” in its

confluence of different voices and perspectives. He, the dramaturg
Florian Borchmeyer and Louis worked on a version for the
Schaubühne — the one that will run at St. Ann’s — in 2018. The
New York Times listed it among Europe’s best theater that year; a
published script is on the way in France.

“There is this classic love story between Édouard and Reda, but
that turns into a tense true crime story,” Ostermeier said. “But
what is the right story, and whose story is it? They are competing
in a kind of battle for the opinion of the spectator.”

James Russell-Morley, center, in “The End of Eddy.” (He shares the title role with Oseloka Obi, on the right
screen.) Sarah Walker

“The End of Eddy” is much more linear and unambiguous. And so

the adaptation by Pamela Carter — directed by Stewart Laing
originally for Untitled Projects and the Unicorn Theater for young
audiences in Britain — imposes more theatricality on the story,
with two actors playing Eddy and four onstage screens with video
and meta-narrative text.

“We’re theater-makers and we’re not interested in reproducing the

book on the stage,” Carter said, adding that she was attracted to
how relatable the story was, and how “very lovely it was that he
found his way out by way of theater.”

That hopefulness is something she wanted young audiences in

Britain to take away from the production; BAM has arranged to
bring in a similar crowd by hosting a free matinee for high school
students.

Dramatic writing has been increasingly woven into Louis’s oeuvre.

While laboring on a new novel, he has also been at work on a play
for the students of a theater school he is teaching at in Lausanne,
Switzerland.

In September, he published a deferential translation of Anne

Carson’s “Antigonick” — a project that began almost as a whim, but
also as a corrective to her virtual nonexistence in France — for
L’Arche. It will be followed by another, of her “Norma Jeane Baker
of Troy,” which he saw at the Shed during a visit to New York last
spring. (Reaction to the play was overwhelmingly negative, but
Louis said he adored its “undoing of genre.”)

His latest book, “Who Killed My Father,” began as a script for the
director Stanislas Nordey at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg.
The result was a poetic stream of consciousness about masculinity,
ambivalent love and the failures of France to help a man trapped
and physically ruined by his working-class life. “The history of
your body,” he writes as an address to his father, “stands as an
accusation against political history.”

Since its publication, “Who Killed My Father” has found its way
back to a dramatic form through multiple adaptations, with more to
come: One, by the Tony Award-winner Ivo van Hove, is planned for
his Internationaal Theater Amsterdam next spring. Ostermeier is
mulling another made with and starring Louis, though it is more of
an “underground” project at the moment, he said, the theatrical
equivalent of a jam session.

It can be a little bizarre for Louis to see all these versions of his life,
and himself, onstage. His reaction depends on the show. “I can’t see
‘History of Violence’ very often,” he said, “because of the difficulty
in seeing this violence that I endured performed again.”

But, in a way, Louis also sees something positive in that — a sense

of purpose. “It means I’m talking about things that are difficult to
address publicly,” he said. “Autobiography starts when you say:
What is impossible to talk about, too private, too difficult? Then
people will recognize themselves in what you’re writing.”

Joshua Barone is a senior staff editor on the Culture Desk, where he writes about
classical music and other fields including dance, theater and visual art and architecture.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section AR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline:
What a Wunderkind Has Wrought. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Édouard Louis, Brooklyn Academy of Music

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