How politics killed theatre

Hope can be remarkably persistent. And so, despite several years of experience pointing in starkly the other direction, a recent weekend saw me at Who Killed My Father at the Young Vic, the latest from ubiquitous Belgian director Ivo van Hove. A young friend had gone with his father the previous week and both described it as ‘excellent’. Intense, but in a good way. Worthy broadsheet publications gave it four stars.

I had my doubts: Édouard Louis, on whose angry memoir about growing up in a working-class, homophobic home in northern France the play was based, is not my cup of tea. But the friend, and his father, are both intelligent and well versed in theatre, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I should give it a chance; that it might have interesting things to say about masculinity and father-son relationships and France, and maybe even class.

It didn’t. It was, in fact, a crudely disjointed, simple play: first a dull exegesis of a loutish father’s failings, and then a predictable rant at the allegedly cruel French state, which, we were instructed at great length, was to blame for the father’s decline after an accident in the factory he worked at badly damaged his back.