Who Killed My Father
Young Vic | ★★★★★

If you take the three (actually Jewish) artistic directors of what my be described as a golden era of London theatre during the first decade or so of the this century: Nicholas Hytner at the National; Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court and David Lan at the Young Vic, only the latter’s successor Kwame Kwei-Armah has installed an air of genuine excitement about what his theatre will come up with next.

The latest offering combines the familiar with the new. The familiar is the vision of Belgian director Ivo van Hove (the man behind the 2015 landmark paired down version of Miller’s A View from the Bridge) and the hard-edged design by his long-time collaborator Jan Versweyveld —here a stark room of black, breeze-block walls with a roughly made bed at one end. The new (at least for most of us in the UK) is the magnificent Dutch actor Hans Kesting.

03. Hans Kesting in Who Killed My Father © Jan Versweyveld

Hans Kesting

In Hesting’s hands van Hove’s adaptation of writer Edouard Louis’s autobiographical book about visiting his estranged father in northern France, is converted into an absolutely gripping tale of reconciliation and loss.

And all in an uninterrupted one and a half hours.

It is a performance in which the mercurial actor inhabits the roles of his character’s mother, violent father and younger, gay self with a shape-shifting ease that belies the actor’s powerful frame.

To convey the patriarch’s physical deterioration from bully to a near cripple following an accident at the factory where he worked, Hester’s fists are pushed into his blue knitted jumper until the father’s belly distends towards the floor just as the son describes.

The assumption is that the son will spend the entire play taking revenge on a father who showed little love and no understanding towards his gay son.

But instead the evening pivots unexpectedly as he reveals an understanding of his father’s condition and the masculine meat-headedness that fulled his homophobia and kept his income low.

10. Hans Kesting in Who Killed My Father © Jan Versweyveld

Kesting

“Hatred of homosexuals equals poverty,” the son declares sorrowfully, as if finding the single most damaging facet of human nature.

Also targetted are post-war French presidents, including Macron, who head the ruling elite that keeps his the father at the bottom of the societal pile.

It is a list that makes sense of the play’s title which deliberately has no question mark. Meanwhile, the speech about how those in power are never affected by the policies they make could grace any hustings.

Then there is the room itself which changes as radically as the actor who occupies it, from stillness in one moment to a hurricane force energy the next. Brace yourself.