★★★★★ THE END OF EDDY ADAPTATION AT THE UNICORN THEATRE
Based on the book by Édouard Louis
Adapted by Pamela Carter
Directed by Stewart Laing
My crime isn’t doing something, it’s being something. Different in a way everyone else can see. My crime is looking gay.
A new stage adaptation of Édouard Louis’s internationally acclaimed autobiographical novel En finir avec Eddy Belleguele opens at London’s Unicorn Theatre on 13 September, following a sell-out critically acclaimed premiere at Edinburgh International Festival this August.
Written when he was just 21 and combining vivid storytelling with frank reflections on sexuality, class and power, The End of Eddy is filled with hope, lust, love and anger. This is a co-production between the Unicorn Theatre and Scotland’s pioneering Untitled Projects’ team - visionary Scottish director, designer Stewart Laing and writer Pamela Carter.
Born into poverty in an isolated village in rural France, a boy grows up amongst hard men and women living hard and violent lives. Bullied relentlessly for being gay, this is the story of Eddy's struggle to understand who he is, who he might become, and of his fight to escape. This phenomenal show touches on some of today's most pertinent and powerful subjects: class, masculinity, power and sexuality.
‘When Stewart Laing and I first read Édouard Louis’ first book, there were experiences we both recognized in aspects of his story — for Stewart especially, as a gay man from a working-class background who grew up in East Kilbride before leaving for London and art school in 1980. But times have changed and Louis has given voice to an experience at the intersection of class, gender and sexuality, which is absolutely of today. This feels like the right time to be making public space in the UK for his story, and to be sharing it, especially with young adult audiences. The book was written with an older audience in mind, but it’s our hope that this production can also speak to people closer to Eddy’s age.
What makes The End of Eddy theatre for both Stewart and me is Louis’ ability to communicate his lived experience with humour, anger and compassion, without resolving its complexity and ambivalences. At the same time that he is Eddy, the hurt and lonely child, he is also Louis, the sociologist and storyteller. His family are characters of his creation as much as they are case histories. He is a Parisian intellectual, revisiting himself as a horny teenager with bad teeth. He is a voice of the working class and a class traitor. He is brilliantly clever and filled with shame; he is fragile and extraordinarily sweet. Louis makes us think about the world we live in without forgetting to feel, and feel without forgetting to think ‘How is this? But above all, we love that it was through making theatre that Eddy Bellegueule was first able to imagine a different life.’
Pamela Carter
The End of Eddy plays at the Unicorn Theatre 13 September – 6 October 2018. The show contains explicit sexual references and frequent strong language. It is suitable for ages 16+.
★★★★ 'The actors win our trust with their vigour, empathy and theatrical inventiveness' The Guardian
★★★★ 'At turns humorous, harrowing and, above all, hopeful’ Morning Star
★★★★ 'A powerful, absorbing and inventive piece' The Herald
★★★★ 'Takes us to the heart of adolescent confusion and longing' The List
★★★★★SG Fringe
Watch the trailer:
View production photos: https://www.facebook.com/pg/unicorntheatre/photos/?tab=album&album_id=10151024066124950
Copies of Édouard Louis’ book are available to buy from the Unicorn Theatre’s online shop: https://www.unicorntheatre.com/Unicornershop
Ticket Offer for Culturetheque Readers
Use promo code CULTURE10 to save up to 50% and get £10 tickets.
Book tickets: https://www.unicorntheatre.com/whatson/240/more-dates
Please note: Discount will be applied at checkout. Maximum of 2 tickets per customer. Subject to availability. Offer not valid 7pm, Tue 18 Sep.
Édouard Louis - Author
Édouard Louis’s first novel, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy), was published when he was 21 years old. It became an immediate bestseller and has now sold in excess of 300,000 copies in France, heralded as a literary revelation by El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Corriere delle Sera, and other publications. He is also the editor of Pierre Bourdieu: l’insoumission en heritage (PUF, 2013). In 2014 Louis received the Prix Pierre Guénin. A second novel, Histoire de la Violence (History of Violence), was published in France in 2016, and Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father, forthcoming in English) earlier this year.
Pamela Carter – Writer
Pamela is a playwright and dramaturg. Plays include: Lines (Yard Theatre); Fast Ganz Nah/Almost Near (Theater Dresden); Skåne (Hampstead Theatre; winner of the New Writing Commission at the Berliner Festspiele Stückemarkt in 2012); What We Know (Traverse Theatre); Wildlife (Magnetic North Theatre Co). Work with Stewart Laing includes: Slope, Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, An Argument About Sex (After Marivaux). Since 2010 she has written for the internationally renowned Swedish artists Goldin+Senneby. She also writes for dance and opera, and has recently adapted a Don Delillo story for composer Lliam Paterson and Scottish Opera. As dramaturg and writer with Vanishing Point Theatre, she has made the award-winning Interiors, Saturday Night, and Tomorrow.
She has also made work for the National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Dance Theatre, Traverse Theatre, Tramway, LIFT, the Young Vic, Hampstead Theatre, and Malmö Opera House, amongst others.
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