Édouard Louis is known primarily as a novelist – and an astonishing one at that – but that hasn’t stopped him also becoming the darling of the European theatre world. Such directorial heavyweights as Ivo Van Hove, Milo Rau and Thomas Ostermeier have staged adaptations of his work, while this year’s Edinburgh International Festival will, for the second time, present a staging of The End of Eddy.
In 2018, Glasgow’s Stewart Laing directed a high-tech version of this autobiographical tale of a poor working-class boy growing up gay in northern France. This August, Norwegian director Eline Arbo will tell the same story in a production by Internationaal Theater Amsterdam.
It is, then, all the more to the credit of Edinburgh director Nora Wardell that her young Surrogate Productions has secured the rights to the first UK stage adaptation of Who Killed My Father. The novelist’s slim yet mesmerising 2018 book speaks with what one commentator called “an emotional authenticity and a stylistic confidence that is hard to ignore”. Written in the crisp, uncluttered prose that characterises Louis’s work, it is a deceptively simple attempt by a young man to reconcile himself with the father from whom he was estranged. [READ MORE]