A one-minute silence marking the announcement of the Queen’s death opened this show on Thursday night. That sombre moment was followed by the monologue of a son in his own state of mourning for his father, who is a wreck of a man, still alive but only just and living at the furthest reaches of the social spectrum.
An Internationaal Theater Amsterdam production in association with the Young Vic, this powerful play is based on Édouard Louis’s 2018 autobiographical novel, written as a letter from son to father. It is part a political battle-cry about class, privilege and toxic masculinity and part an emotion-soaked story of complicated family love. Having grown up gay with a violent factory-worker father and experiencing homophobia inside his home and out, the son (Hans Kesting) returns to the northern French village of his childhood.
Director Ivo van Hove elicits a performance of captivating intensity from Kesting. He addresses the invisible father but also slips into playing him. The transformation between the laconic gruffness of the father and the pain and anger of the son is penetrating and precise. The father occasionally shuffles to a door to smoke and his hunched figure, spluttering and bent, is a shattering image.
Jan Versweyveld’s stage design is characteristically stripped back, drawing our eye to every detail. The family home is a negative space with showers of light that occasionally break through to suggest a better, more beautiful world beyond. Intersections of shame and love are explored as well as the father’s machismo – although the son’s reflections on the latter sometimes sound like an intellectual deconstruction of working-class masculinity, with generalised equations made.
His anger over his father’s pained poverty segues into political diatribe, with the distant hum of a crowd conjuring the gilets jaunes. Connections between the body politic and his father’s injured body are important but require a change of register and theatrically that diverts from the father-son reckoning and they sound generic in their rage against the “ruling class”.
But these detours do not take away from the force of emotion in the son’s story. Grief-soaked and gut-wrenching, this is unmissable theatre.
At the Young Vic, London, until 24 September
