WHO KILLED MY FATHER?

/ STAGE DESIGN, COSTUME, PUPPET MAKING /

DIRECTORS: Zita Szenteczki, Domokos Kovács
TEXT: Édouard Louis

PREMIERE: 2023, Jurányi Incubator House, Budapest

A politically charged stage adaptation based on Édouard Louis, intertwining family biography and class violence through precise scenic condensation and physical presence.

“If this were a theatre text, it would have to begin with the following words: A father and a son stand several meters apart in a vast, empty space. This space could be a wheat field, an abandoned industrial site, a schoolyard. Perhaps it is snowing. Perhaps the snow slowly covers them and makes them disappear. Father and son almost never look at each other. Only the son speaks, his first sentences appearing brightly lit on a sheet of paper or a projection surface. He tries to address his father, to speak to him, but one does not know why—the father seems not to understand him. They are close to one another and yet cannot find each other. Their skin touches at times; they come into contact, but even in these moments they remain distant. That only the son speaks—and only he—causes pain to both: it deprives the father of the possibility of telling his own life, and the son waits for an answer that will never come.” — Édouard Louis

Édouard Louis’s autobiographical novel presents, through fragments of memory, the relationship between the author and his father: their struggles with one another for mutual understanding and acceptance, as well as for experiencing and expressing love for each other. According to the author’s own definition, the text is the sum of love letters to his father—or more than that: a novel about why it is so difficult to say to one another, I love you. Who Killed My Father is an intimate story, yet at its core lie the political context and the question of social responsibility. The production seeks to connect puppet theatre with contemporary dance, a choral text with a political manifesto.

Based on the book QUI A TUÉ MON PÈRE by Édouard Louis.

– PHOTOS BY DÓRA GULYÁS –