History of Violence

Around four o'clock in the morning on Christmas Day 2012, returning to home after a dinner from friends, Édouard met a man, Reda. "He approached me on the street and I finally proposed to him to come from me. There he told me the story of his childhood and his father's arrival in France, fleeing Algeria. We spent the rest of the night together, talked, laughed. At 6 a.m., he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, raped me."

It has the power of lived life History of Violence, the autobiographical account by Édouard Louis, a brilliant and widely read French writer, now in his thirties. Published in 2016 (in Italy from Bompiani, like all of Louis' books, in Fabrizio Ascari's translation), the writer's second opera after his big debut with 2014's The Eddy Bellegueule Case, History of Violence traces the drama of the rape experienced by the protagonist/author on that Christmas night, with a progression that continually interweaves more general and social themes such as emigration, racism, poverty, desire, and homophobia. It is precisely this reverberation between the personal and the political, the private and the public that appealed to to Thomas Ostermeier, 53, the best known and most acclaimed director in German theater today. "His" History of Violence, premiering in Italy at Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, originated at Berlin's Schaubühne in 2018, followed in 2020 from another play based on the French writer'sopera , Who Killed My Father?

"Louis' work interests me" - Ostermeier explains - "because it gives voice to the marginalized, to those living in poverty, to those living with hardship in this Europe that wants to be the continent of the happy few. Louis talks about social classes, the rich and dominant and the marginalized poor. The last to to do something like this was probably Bertolt Brecht. I see this as an important line in my work. It's these issues that I'm interested in bringing to theater, ever since '98, ever since Shopping and fucking, when I staged Ravenhill's text about people living to London selling themselves and looking for work. Along these same lines, more recently, I have been working on Didier Eribon's essay, Return to Reims, and now, precisely, on Édouard Louis who was his student. I am interested in writers who in the intellectual landscape introduce the discourse on classes. It gives me pleasure to engage with them and give them a voice." History of Violence does so in a particular way, because the shocking effects of sexual violence are measured not only on the body and mind of the victim, the young Louis who narrates himself, but also reverberate on the various authoritarian patterns of institutional structures, the police and the hospital, for example, on the family and homophobia of the working classes, and even on the marginality of the rapist who is an immigrant, one who had only the misfortune of having grown up "on the wrong side of the Mediterranean." "The private trauma ends up exploring public issues, and the intimate diary becomes a general narrative of our society," the director explains.

If Louis uses writing to find what is most disturbing and express it, Ostermeier follows it with a dramaturgy, signed from himself with Florian Borchmeyer and Édouard Louis himself, that slightly modifies the original novel-with a few cuts and the addition of some dialogue-and articulates the complex narrative structure on stage with different languages, live acting, video projections on the back wall to show the faces of the characters in the foreground but also the most dramatic moments, music that punctuates the different chapters of the story, and animated, almost danced parts, so from mixing the before and after, doubling the events, showing different points of view just as the intimate diary on the page does.

Nina Wetzel's minimalist stage is a white space with a couple of tables, chairs creating the different environments, on one side drummer and keyboardist Thomas Witte punctuates the acting of the four performers, led from Laurenz Laufenberg, a longtime actor of the Schaubühne company, who is both the narrator and the protagonist and bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Louis though not intended, as Ostermeier himself admits, and alongside to him Renato Schuch who is Reda, Alina Stiegler and Christoph Gawenda who take turns in the different characters called upon. "Fundamental is the context against which Édouard's private drama is measured," Ostermeier explains. "When he goes to his sister Clara in northern France and confides the whole affair to her in order to seek emotional shelter, for example, she blames him for levity and despite herself ends up replaying the creeping homophobia of the family in which she grew up and of the working classes in general. Or when Édouard realizes that it's not a great idea to go to the police, or to the hospital, because in the cold, bureaucratic process of reconstructing the event or in the doctors' reports he finds the usual patterns of racism and homophobia, not his own emotions or his own story." "Whose story is it now?" wonders Édouard.

The play thus becomes an affair that offers a strong emotional impact but also cues for reflections on the political structure of our world, even those that seem most irreconcilable: the post-trauma dissociation of the protagonist, for example, who sees himself as he labors in the shower to removing the rapist's scent from his body, but at the same time knows that by denouncing him he has given the police a pretext for racist remarks, or the ambivalent feeling he has toward Reda, of hatred but also of empathy toward someone who, having arrived in France to support his family, has found violence, oppression, to himself a victim of French racism.

"The way the people around to Édouard act and react, Édouard's own reactions determine a complexity, which is the political side of the story."-Ostermeier says-"Although it does not mean that History of Violence is a 'political' show. Political to me means something that is able to force a change in reality. But those who go to theater are only a small minority, and from alone cannot change much. So when I talk about political, I am referring to the fact that the audience can find something in the show that can become important for themselves in society," including the realization that the threads that bind fear, racism, homophobia, love, desire, attraction, and violence are not easily untangled.

"For all these reasons I am very attached to this work" - says Ostermeier - "I thank Édouard who had the confidence to deliver this story of his to me. And I thank the actors who put themselves on the line in an obvious, authentic way, full of truth, even in the intimate rape scenes. Complicit, in this, in my idea of theater, of recasting acting to elevate a story. And this story, of violence, homophobia, class poverty is in the end also a love story, perhaps the most important theme of human life."

Anna Bandettini