There is always something going on at the summit of desperation: At the International New Drama Festival (FIND) at the Berlin Schaubühne, two very different artists undertake their journeys into the heart of darkness. With the French star writer Édouard Louis, who plays himself in Thomas Ostermeier’s production “Qui a tué mon père” (“Who killed my father”), it is the harshness of class society that has little sympathy for the losers produced. For the Spanish extreme performer and director Angélica Liddell, it is existential pain that can only find a way out of the all-devouring senselessness in a celebration of death, in the obscene crossing of boundaries.
These are productions that go to the limit of what is possible in the theater – with Liddell in excess, with Louis and Ostermeier in undisguised personal self-questioning. Both are declarations of war in their own way, for Louis to the prevailing conditions, for Liddell in principle to everything, especially to the affect controls of Western civilization. One of her poetic hateful slogans refers to Charles Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”: “We are the black flowers of a civilized society”.
Angélica Liddell cuts her thighs and hands in “Liebestod”
Thomas Ostermeier’s staging of Èdouard Louis’ autobiographical essay comes to the Schaubühne after a four-week Paris guest performance. It is a solo in which the author, who has been celebrated since his books “The End of Eddy” and “In the Heart of Violence” (which Ostermeier also staged), works through a long letter to his father, a factory worker from the provinces. In view of the considerable fame of the public figure Louis, this could have been an embarrassing ego show, the self-marketing of family lower-class misery: Look here, in the theaters of the privileged, no one suffers so sensitively from the inhumanity of class society as the famous Édouard Louis. Ostermeier and Louis avoid this trap thanks to the accuracy of the text and the sobriety of the staging: no big show of sympathy, no excesses of pathos, instead the clarity of a lecture with occasional outbreaks of dance on the bad mainstream pop that inspired Louis in his youth.
The writer sits behind his laptop or directs his sentences to an empty chair for the absent father. In the background, films (video: Sébastien Dupouey) show car trips through a gray, fog-covered northern France, dreary skyscrapers, monotonous, empty landscapes and factories. The Paris of the leading intellectuals, in which Louis moves today, could not be further away from these stretches of land of the abandoned.
Édouard Louis in “Qui a tué mon père” as a guest performance at the Berlin Schaubühne.
(Photo: Jean Louis Fernandez)
As a performer of his text, Louis has a stage presence in which shyness is combined with the defiant self-confidence of a person who had to laboriously learn to say “I” – working on oneself and one’s social role as a tough, political and very personal struggle : Here I am, that’s what I have to say. Every memory of childhood, every look at one’s parents is associated with pain, sadness and amazement.
While Louis, like Didier Eribon in “Return to Reims”, described in his earlier books the toxic masculinity, homophobia and disdain for education of his background and his self-liberation in the gay scene in the capital, “Qui a tué mon père” is a cautious, loving approximation to his father. A serious accident at work in the factory smashed his back. The changing heads of government only stand for a continuity of contempt: under Chirac, the subsidies for the drugs that Louis’ father urgently needs are canceled, under Sarkozy he is forced to take any dirty job, Hollande insults him and his kind as lazy, Macron cuts social benefits and lowers property taxes. “The pain never went away,” says Èdouard Louis, it is the pain about his childhood and the ruined life of his father.
Eight penises and one vagina: is that enough to shock?
Angélica Liddell’s theater is also about pain, and not only because at the beginning of her new work “Liebestod” the performer injured her thighs and hands with a razor blade as if in a ritual act: show your wound. Her pain and self-abandonment retreats are an attempt to continue Artaud’s theater of cruelty. Like curses, she utters her frenzied monologues, like lashes they descend on her audience: “Not death is tragedy, birth is tragedy”. If sentences could kill, no viewer would survive these songs of hate and despair. Liddell climbs into an increasingly ludicrous furore in which she wishes pretty much everything the devil from well-bred French schoolgirls (whom she would like to “slit open from top to bottom” on the stage) to the secular state and turns to reactionary, iridescent anti- Utopia is falling (“I demand a theocracy”). This bears a certain resemblance to the tirades of hate by the exaggerated artist Thomas Bernhard and, despite all serious hatred, is always just as funny as Bernhard’s failures.
The production celebrates a famous bullfighter, but the ideal of Liddell’s theater has been achieved in bullfighting: death in the arena is not just an act. For others, the exaggeration of pathos when Liddell kneels in front of a stuffed bull (“I beg you, kill me”) would be nothing more than a pose. With the Liddell it seems like an aggressive act of love. There is no shortage of highly stylized, aggressive love acts in their second FIND guest performance “The Scarlet Letter”. For example, when a dancer slips a finger into the performer’s exposed genitals or when she grips the penises of her eight naked dancers with an unmoved expression.
Like all true radicals, Liddell is extremely reflective and polite in personal conversations. She laments “a complete uprooting of the rite. But the rite is what accompanies us at the decisive points in life”. The desacralization of the arts leads, according to their conviction, “to mediocrity. Death is suppressed. As a result, artistic expression suffers”.
Even if she emphasizes that her new piece is not a reaction to the pandemic, in this perspective it has to do with her. “During the entire dark period of the pandemic, the media did not show any pictures of the dead. They showed the people dancing and singing on the balconies,” Liddell said indignantly. “This is a brutalized and dulled society. It has not come to terms with death, it is traumatized without knowing it. It has no images for horror. We need funeral rites at this time.” The furthest female theater artist in Europe insists that catharsis is the core of tragedy, a purification of the affects. Angélica Liddell, obviously a crystal-clear moralist behind all the obscene border crossings in her theater, works with her theatrical shocks on what she sees as necessary mourning rites.