A Little Life (Amsterdam)

[JBC3]

Posted: 9/29/18 at 5:17pm

Rave reviews all around for Ivo van Hove’s 4-hr adaptation of the acclaimed Hanya Yanagihara novel that opened this week.  I will be seeing it when it again enters the repertory in Amsterdam in April 2019 but it would be great for at least a BAM transfer as was done with his Angels in America.

I am posting the complete 5-star Financial Times review below but there are more at the theatre website and you can get an English translation by entering the urls into Google Translate.

FT review—

Stage blood is stubborn. It soaks through clothing and stains the skin. After four hours onstage in A Little Life, Ramsey Nasr is covered in it. As Jude St Francis, a compulsive self-harmer grossly abused as a child, he endures a lifetime of suffering. As one close friend puts it, “He’s all scar tissue now.”

Hanya Yanagihara’s novel about four friends in New York became an international bestseller in 2015, when it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Awfully compelling, it’s a guilty page-turner. Every chapter heaps fresh pain on its traumatised protagonist. Jude’s closest friends repeatedly clean him up — an endless cycle of self-annihilation and care. This stage version, from Ivo Van Hove, is just as horribly transfixing. For all its agonies, you can’t look away.

Koen Tachelet’s spare adaptation muddles the chronology, swimming woozily between reality and memory. Nasr, slumped beneath a white sink on a red scab of stage, makes a ritual of cutting that brings his past back to life. His abusers blur into one. Hans Kesting, dressed in black, stalks the stage; smiling benignly as Brother Luke, the monk who abducts and pimps Jude as a boy; brutish as Caleb, bouncing his lover around like a basketball; chillingly inexpressive as Doctor Traylor, who restores Jude’s health just to torture him afresh. They toy with him like schoolboys scorching ants with a magnifying glass.

Such cycles run throughout: harm and healing, trauma and therapy. Van Hove looks at life in terms of process and, as Jude’s friends work around Jan Versweyveld’s compartmentalised stage — an artist painting, an actor running through his lines — there’s a suggestion that Jude’s self-harm is itself a practice. The phrase “getting better” pings ambiguously out of the text. It’s an unflinching, eviscerating watch that dissects abuse as a pattern, self-replicating pain.

Van Hove controls the mood like a precision engineer. Mark Thewessen’s videos crawl the kerbs of New York in ominous slow-mo: lights flicker, people stare. A string quartet scores the action onstage, sometimes scratchy as fingernails, sometimes a plaintive sigh. Like the book, it’s almost too much — misery porn — but the staging resists any cathartic release. It’s so suffocating you long to shrug it off as implausible, but you can’t: Nasr’s too committed for that. He plumbs the depths of self-pity and self-loathing, but always steels himself to survive, coping just to prove that he can. He’s scar tissue — and this is Van Hove at his best, theatre that leaves an ineradicable mark.

 

Updated On: 9/29/18 at 05:17 PM

[JVJ93]

Posted: 9/29/18 at 6:43pm

Thanks for posting this! I’m super hopeful this will make the jump over to the states in some capacity.

[bwayphreak234]

Posted: 9/29/18 at 6:47pm

One of my favorite novels of all time. A literary masterpiece. I would kill to see a production of this.

[JBC3]

Posted: 9/29/18 at 7:30pm

I believe Netflix has greenlighted a mini series of it as well.

[Miserent]

Posted: 9/29/18 at 10:42pm

As much as I loved this book, it absolutely devastated me. Seriously, for days I was in a weird, sad mood after I finished the novel. I'm not sure I could handle watching this come to life onstage, or in a miniseries. That being said, if this came to New York, I'd probably still go see it out of curiosity. Are there enough tissues in the tri-state area?

[JasonC3]

Posted: 2/27/22 at 10:11am

In this Guardian article Hanya Yanagihara says the show will be coming to NYC after playing in Edinburgh this summer.

"She said the “spectacular” stage production, which had its world premiere in Amsterdam in 2018, will be performed for the first time in the UK at the Edinburgh international festival in August before going to New York."

BAM perhaps?

[n2nbaby]

Posted: 2/27/22 at 11:22am

I am so mixed on the play (and the series). A Little Life is my favorite book and I would LOVE both, but I also am unsure I’m able to go through the trauma again. I cry even talking about the book, honestly.

[inception]

Posted: 2/27/22 at 11:47am

That book is nothing but trauma porn.  It is completely out of touch with reality. Nohing reads true, is is only the perverse fantasies of its author.

[ClydeBarrow]

Posted: 2/27/22 at 12:24pm

I almost went to Amsterdam to see this years ago. I'm very excited that it's finally coming to NYC. I'm assuming it still has to be the Ivo production. Oh how I have missed seeing his productions.

[imeldasturn]

Posted: 2/27/22 at 12:26pm

inception said: "That book is nothing but trauma porn. It is completely out of touch with reality. Nohing reads true, is is only the perverse fantasies of its author."

Agreed.

I think Ivo's theatre streamed the show during the lockdown and maybe there are still some clips online. I watched only a few minutes and I didn't think it was bad, very actors-centred and faithful to the source material.

[Jasmine Green]

Posted: 2/27/22 at 4:09pm

inception said: "That book is nothing but trauma porn. It is completely out of touch with reality. Nohing reads true, is is only the perverse fantasies of its author."

There was a recent profile (takedown) of Yanagihara on Vulture that basically said all of this. 

I do wonder how the play will go over. 

[JasonC3]

Posted: 2/27/22 at 4:50pm

While I understand those who call it trauma porn, I found the book and the stories it unfolds to be an incredibly compelling read.  And the reality is some people have lived through great trauma.

Given what Jude experienced as a child, his recurring self-harm is not unreasonable.  That Yanagihara doesn't smooth over his severe pain to me is a feature, not a bug, painful as some of those sections were to read.