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.
