As a stage adaptation of The End of Eddy, Édouard Louis bestselling autobiographical novel about anti-gay bullying, comes to the Dublin Theatre Festival, its director Stewart Laing talks to Brian Finnegan about his own reasons for taking on the project, toxic masculinity, and young people inding self-empowerment.

In the opening scene of Édouard Louis’ autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy, its ten year-old protagonist is being spat at and assaulted by two other boys in a school corridor. It’s a difficult scene to read, and life for Eddy doesn’t get any easier as the book progresses.

Set in a poverty stricken Northern French village, it tells the story of Eddy, who identified as a “faggot” from an early age is lowest of a pecking order in a racist, macho environment that’s contained and inflamed by economic conditions. Along with loathing himself, he lives in inescapable terror.