After its initial cancellation in May 2021, on March 2, 2022, The Interrogation, a collaboration between Swiss theatre maker Milo Rau and French author Édouard Louis, finally saw its inaugural performance at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA). Written in Louis’s signature autobiographical style, the play offers an exploration of the politics of failure. It is difficult to say how much of the original text was edited with the retrospective gaze of Louis’s withdrawal as the project’s main (and sole) actor. The monologue, now performed by Belgian actor Arne De Tremerie, begins with an audio recording of Louis reading his email to Rau, trying to explain why he no longer wanted to participate in the production as an actor. How, although acting had always been his dream and – as the monologue lays out for us – he spent years training as an actor, the life of an actor was, in the end, not what he expected and suddenly finds himself unable to continue as such.
The Interrogation is, according to Rau, titled as such because of the series of questions it poses to the audience:
What do you like about theatre?
Do you enjoy talking to yourself?
Do you like improv?
Do you like applause?
Do you think I’m shy?
Do I like to sing?
Why didn’t the lorry driver pick me?
Do you like to read?
Do you like to find parallels with yourself?
What does violence look like?
Do you like it when films end suddenly?
What can we do?
Are you tired?
Will this ever end?
However, it is also an interrogation of self and the many contradictory forces that shaped Louis – born Eddy Bellegueule and self-christened Édouard Louis upon his arrival in Paris – bringing him to this moment on (or more specifically off) the ITA stage. It is a narrative about the fight to find oneself in a world that is too often violent and suffocating, about the continuous reality of the failure that inevitably accompanies this quest. That too often we fight our way onto the stage we think we want, only to find it is not the utopia we dreamed of and we do not want to be here.
Louis, through his onstage double, tells a shortened version of the life he has spent so many novels recalling. His youth in the small French village of Hallencourt and the impossibility of existing as a queer youth in a community marked by poverty. He recalls how the violence and trauma of poverty ran through the community like, as Louis puts it, an electrical current: “my Father humiliated other people because he was humiliated in his work. He then put that aggression onto my Mother and my Mother put that aggression onto me.” He talks about growing up gay and effeminate in this environment, the bullying and isolation he faced. How he took up hobbies and joined afterschool clubs – including his school’s theatre club – in search of a reprise from his isolation and a way out of the violence of his situation. These newfound but often quickly abandoned pastimes played a role in young Louis’s planned revenge: the revenge of defying his tormentors by living well, showing them by becoming famous and successful. To show them that he did, in fact, become something. That they didn’t win or break him. Because if he could make something of himself, then they’d have been wrong about him and they’d feel… shame? regret?
While it’s a childish, maybe even naïve concept of revenge, it is one that understands fighting back in the moment is impossible. One that understands that the act of violence – both physical and psychological – with its brutal humiliation is, at its core, an act of diminishment and ultimately erasure itself laced with shame. It understands that the best retaliation against such violence is the simple but infinitely complex act of continued existence and, as young Louis himself hypothesized, a presentational life without shame for the queer or effeminate.
The production, although billed as a staged reading, is, more or less, a complete production. The simple but effective staging places De Tremerie on a virtually empty stage: onstage is De Tremerie, his red backpack, a camera, a plastic chair like those found in high schools across the globe, and a screen, carefully hung above the stage.
In classic Rau style, there is a clever intermediality that sees the periodic use of livestream of De Tremerie talking into the camera whose live feed is then projected above the stage which is periodically overtaken by a pre-recorded film of Louis, wearing the same hoodie as De Tremerie and seated in seemingly the same plastic chair. This digital manifestation interacts with the tiny Belgian double below him. The switch from livestream to recording often happens with such a light touch that it takes a moment for those in the audience (or at any rate, for me) to even notice that we are looking at Louis on the screen and not De Tremerie. The first time that the recording deviated from the onstage action and Louis’s gaze followed De Tremerie as he wandered across the stage an audible gasp could be heard from the audience.
The Interrogation reaches for a universality, which may also be a weakness of the text. Although it comes close, the production never quite finds the level of microscopic specificity – ironically, a specificity that Louis/De Tremerie directly discuss in the text, which they certainly discussed in the post-performance talk, and which Louis is known for in his novels. While there is some, what could be referred to as, surface universality in its discussions of fear of failure, imposter syndrome, and the way we all (on various levels) exist in plurality, editing and adjusting how we present ourselves (talk, laugh, move) in different social, professional, and familial contexts, it never entirely punctures the depth of these themes as they exist on a philosophical, existential level.
That said – perhaps inadvertently – The Interrogation offers an insightful representation of a quintessentially queer experience. The doubling and at times tripling of Louis through De Tremerie’s beautiful performance[1] and the medial double projected of livestream De Tremerie and pre-filmed (?)[2] Louis who breaks from the enactment of onstage events to move his head and stare down at De Tremerie evokes a closeted experience. Those persons who for fear, for safety, for any number of reasons conceal their queerness, always playing another version of themselves for the outside world, who are always performing another even if the only distance between themselves and this other is an exclusion. It speaks to a performance of knowing that in certain contexts markers of queerness must be carefully covered in well-rehearsed performances, because we are inhabitants of a world that ostracizes the different, the other, the queer, and the unfamiliar.[3] It speaks to an internalized (though often unrecognized) homophobia and/or transphobia. It speaks to the wish to just fit in, to not understanding or even seeing the difference that everyone else seems to when they look at you. To learning those differences must be covered to avoid cruelty, as well as the desire to find a place where nothing must be concealed, where everything can be laid bare. The performance touches on the experience of playing another person in public to protect the deeply, intimately private self. The experience of wanting to be seen but understanding the danger of being fully seen. An ingrained understanding that the full exposure of self will – even later in life – be accompanied by a risk to self.
The Interrogation is the story of a young man who always dreamed of being an actor; for whom acting was, in his youth, an escape from his small town and leave for the city; who always held acting as his true calling and revenge on those who tormented him in his youth; who was sure that his life would return to the theatre, only to discover – to his great disappointment – the life of an actor is not what he thought it would be. That he does not feel comfortable or happy on stage. That the theatre – even in a show where you play yourself – is not a space to reveal your full self, perhaps because it reveals a little too clearly that we are only ever really playing versions ourselves.
It is an evening about the failure: the failure of Louis to overcome his discomfort, the failure of The Interrogation to find a way to premiere last May at KFDA in Brussels, and – as the person sitting in the seat next to me, Livaskio, noted – the failure of Édouard Louis, as he returned to the ITA stage for the curtain call and talkback, to actually break free of The Interrogation and the expectations of theatre.
[1] Truly my highest compliments to Arne De Tremerie for his performance during this evening and bringing an earnestness and, despite the seriousness of The Interrogation, a sense of joy to the production.
[2] This may have been a livestream of Louis from offstage. I am honestly not sure.
[3] We must also recognize – which The Interrogation does not and must not – that this fear, this danger of violence, that The Interrogation gestures towards is increased for those outside the white, cis-male gay community who are still marginalized, but differently than those two- or three-fold marginalized such as BIPOC queer persons, transpersons, and BIPOC transpeople.
Lost Dramaturgin International 