i-divadlo.cz // Reflection // Édouard Louis Three Times, for the Third Time
For the third time, works by the French writer Édouard Louis have found their way onto Czech, or more specifically Prague, stages. Following adaptations of the eponymous novels in Who Killed My Father, presented by Jakub Čermák with the company Depresivní děti touží po penězích, and Tomáš Loužný's History of Violence at Prague's Švandovo Theatre, three of the author's novels provided the basis for the Prague City Theatres production Change: A Method: A Woman's Battles and Transformations, Change: A Method and Monique Escapes. The adaptation was written and directed by Dávid Paška, a Slovak theatre director, playwright and writer who also works in Austria, Romania and Germany, as well as on international co-productions. Until now, he has presented his work to Czech audiences at international festivals: in September 2025, with the Slovak National Theatre's production Tatarka at the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, and in April of this year, when the Nová Komedie festival hosted Endsieg/Dobytí by Bratislava's Malá scéna theatre. This is Paška's first collaboration with a Czech ensemble.
In the programme for his Prague production, he states that he encountered Édouard Louis's novels, particularly the title work Change: A Method, while studying in Austria, when he found striking parallels with his own experience of moving abroad and undergoing a personal transformation. At the same time, however, he acknowledges that over the years he has become more critical of the author's work, and it is precisely this that he regards as the driving force behind his current project.
The French writer and intellectual Édouard Louis achieved worldwide recognition with his very first autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy, which has since been followed by six more. In them, he repeatedly returns to his own life and the lives of those closest to him, shaped by northern France – one of the country's economically poorest regions, characterised by low levels of education, limited employment opportunities and a certain degree of social isolation. He raises questions of class inequality, violence, homophobia, social mobility, patriarchy and the transformation of identity. He also addresses these subjects in his lectures, where he combines a broader reflection on these social issues with personal experience.
As the production's dramaturg, Lenka Veverková, observes in an interview with director Dávid Paška published in the programme, in autofiction the reader encounters the other characters solely through personal memories and assumptions about why they act as they do. Dávid Paška adds that this is precisely what he finds dramaturgically compelling about the text, noting that what remains on stage above all are the performers – the actors as bearers of the text – and that "the way in which they appropriate it creates a crucial layer of autonomy, since it is precisely their awareness of the characters' fragmentary nature and of their own position within the construction of situations that generates a particular kind of alienating reflection."
He works with this very distinctly in his production, on several levels at once: through the actors' distance from their characters, as well as through the detachment within their performances, emphasising that these characters are only what the author has written about them and that they are aware of this. The actors thus frequently step out of their roles, addressing one another by their own names during the action or adding information in the form of secondary text introducing a situation ("A fictional monologue by Elena for Édouard, by Édouard for the character of Elena."), or through simple statements ("I don't have any more lines there!"). The distance that creates the desired tension is further intensified by shifts in the position of the narrator. Instead of Tomáš Dalecký, who portrays Eddy, passages from Louis's books are often recited by the other actors, while specific situations described in those passages unfold on stage. They also add critical comments on these situations from the perspective of particular characters ("Is that supposed to be me?"). In this way, they lend the characters a voice that is, on the one hand, still limited by what the author has written, yet, on the other, becomes more personal in a certain sense through the actors' own performances. The author, embodied in the character of Eddy, nevertheless remains unequivocal and insurmountable – in those moments when he stops the text, moves it forward and refuses to let the others finish speaking because they are becoming caught up in endless arguments or confronting uncomfortable realities.
The five actors – Tomáš Dalecký as Eddy, Eva Salzmannová as his mother Monique, Ivana Uhlířová as his sister Clara, Petr Jeništa as his father and Tomáš Weisser as his brother, with all except Tomáš Dalecký also appearing as other key characters – are joined on stage by a camera operator (Dominik Lukács Žižka or Ludvík Otevřel). Using a camera mounted on a crane and track, he films the live action on stage and, through live cinema, presents it to the audience from a different angle and in greater detail than they would otherwise be able to observe. Moreover, the actors themselves enter the shots, move the camera or readjust it so that it captures images according to what they wish to bring closer to the audience's attention or conceal from the camera's gaze. This further emphasises the alienating distance, the work with multiple layers and the problem of viewing situations only from particular angles – something for which Édouard Louis, as an author, can readily be criticised, in accordance with statements made by the family members about whom he writes.
Dávid Paška thus succeeds in working with the differences between the individual layers, setting them in conflict while simultaneously connecting them and layering them like skins, without losing sight of the story told by Édouard Louis and by the production based on three of his novels. It is a story of the difficult process of becoming independent, of liberation and transformation – not only the author's own, Eddy's, but also his mother's. Alongside Eddy, Monique becomes the production's most prominent and important character. This is particularly true towards the end, when the previously hectic action, unfolding at a frenetic pace that all five actors sustain with complete assurance, briefly gives way to a slowing of tempo and a projected, pre-recorded film. Largely because of this, she appears briefly, though not only on one occasion, to be the central figure – as though Eddy's story were intended to serve "merely" as an introduction to her own.
This is emphasised not only by the similar stories of the two characters, but also by the identical passages, words, cries and lamentations that both utter at particular moments almost independently of each other, or rather that Eddy repeats after his mother. Tomáš Dalecký and Eva Salzmannová are thus given the most substantial acting space and make full use of it. The others do not hesitate either: Ivana Uhlířová, Petr Jeništa and Tomáš Weisser move confidently between the various characters they portray and between the production's different registers. The situations unfolding the story of Eddy's life are markedly expressive, effectively depicting the violence Louis describes, in the desired contrast to the detachment and naturalism of the production's "superstructural" layers.
With this production, Prague City Theatres have once again hit the mark this season. Although its form may prove difficult for many audience members to grasp, and it may take some time to connect with the chosen approach, Change: A Method represents, following Destroy – also staged at Divadlo Komedie – another successful adaptation of contemporary and thematically highly relevant literature. It provides the material with the necessary distance and perspective, employs popular modern theatrical devices and, above all, draws strength from fully focused, meticulously developed and precise performances.