This story of an outsider looks more central each time it is told. Édouard Louis’s 2014 biographical novel The End of Eddy follows a boy growing up gay and bullied in a poverty-stricken town in north-eastern France. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and was given a sharp staging three years ago at Edinburgh, in a version by Pamela Carter. International theatre, livestreamed and subtitled, has come closer during the pandemic. Last Saturday, a 2020 adaptation of Louis’s book by the young Norwegian director Eline Arbo could be caught on screen. Performed in Dutch, but with English subtitles, at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, it was transcendent.
Juul Dekker’s design encases the action in a shell of crinkled plastic: you can hear it crackle underfoot. It could be a collapsed parachute, a ruffled igloo – or the veined interior of a skull. It is flimsy as shelter but it hides sky and horizon: when lifted away at the end, you realise how much light it has shaded.
Four tremendous young actors – Victor Ijdens, Jesse Mensah, Felix Schellekens and Romijn Scholten – take all the parts. They are in turn Eddy – willowy, tentative, trying to make himself tough – and his schoolmates, masturbating to a porn movie in fluorescent underpants. They are his parents too: the unemployed father who lashes his child; the mother who talks non-stop, a cigarette dangling. On keyboard, drums and guitar, they supply music which runs throughout the evening: sometimes a sigh, sometimes an electronic clash and challenge, sometimes a mere tremble in the air.
This sharing of roles is more than a triumph of versatility. It goes to the heart of things. Torment is shared. Eddy is bullied, but the bullies are also caught in a trap of poverty, lack of power, forever diminishing chances. Eddy, always good at pretending, escapes to become an actor: the play embodies a strong plea for the transforming power of theatre and its empathetic leaps of imagination.
