divadelni-noviny.cz//Reviews//When the Family Strikes Back
Review, 23 June 2026
Author: Veronika Bednářová
"Your life belongs to me too" – this sentence appears on both the front and back cover of the programme for the production How to Become Someone Else, whose author is not only the contemporary French writer Édouard Louis, but just as significantly the twenty-seven-year-old Slovak director, playwright and writer Dávid Paška, who works on German-language stages and is appearing as a guest in Prague, and in the Czech Republic, for the very first time.
The production at Divadlo Komedie was created based on three recent prose works by Louis: How to Become Someone Else (2021), A Woman's Battles and Transformations (2021), and what is probably his strongest book, Monique Escapes (2024). Thanks to Paška's radical direction, however, it is by no means merely a portrait of the famous author, whose books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Almost on our own skin, we experience a lightning-fast family epic set in the socially excluded rural north of France — a world that clings like a leech even to the author's new, long-dreamed-of Parisian life …