Even the walk to your seat at A Little Life is an ominous experience. Signs in the lobby warn of suicide, nudity, drugs, self-harm, rape and violence. (Charmingly, swearing and smoking are also listed.) Crisis helplines are listed on placards. Two paramedics sit just outside the theatre doors – they’re always there, one of them says, but they’re well aware of what is about to happen on stage. They’re ready. Some of the audience are not.
Even if you’ve avoided the celebrated and pilloried novel by Hanya Yanagihara, you will have likely heard of it: a 700-pager following four friends, all of them are beautiful, talented and devoted to each other, as they live and work in an atemporal New York. There’s JB, a talented artist whose work is sought by major galleries; Willem, a kind, handsome actor; and Malcolm, an accomplished architect at a prestigious firm.
And there’s Jude St Francis, an elusive lawyer with a limp and a mysterious past, the gradual and painful reveal of which drives the plot. The New Yorker once called Jude “one of the most accursed characters to ever darken a page”; but for Titus Andronicus’s Lavinia, or perhaps the characters of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Jude is easily also one of the most accursed figures to step on stage.
This adaptation of Yanagihara’s 2015 novel is directed by Ivo van Hove, director of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, and adapted by Koen Tachelet. It is performed entirely in Dutch, with English surtitles beamed above the stage. At least in the Adelaide production, this can be a challenge, depending where you are seated: perched roughly in the middle of the stand, I sometimes found myself missing lines when the characters had moved to certain corners, my eyes having to travel a jot too far to keep up.
There is much to admire in A Little Life. Ramsey Nasr gives a remarkable performance as Jude, from open-hearted child to deeply traumatised adult. Steven Van Watermeulen is warm and fatherly as Jude’s mentor Harold, and Hans Kesting is impressively threatening, tasked with performing all of Jude’s abusers. Maarten Heijmans, Majd Mardo and Edwin Jonker are fine as Willem, JB and Malcolm, but the latter two often have very little to do. Almost everyone in A Little Life, both on page and stage, is male, but Marieke Heebink as Jude’s first social worker, Ana, is a standout presence. Dead when the story begins, Ana stalks the stage offering Jude advice and warnings, like a one-woman Greek chorus.
The stage design, by van Hove’s partner and longtime collaborator Jan Versweyveld, is wonderfully simple: a stylish open-plan apartment that seamlessly serves as a doctor’s office, a monastery, nightclubs and hotel rooms. This is bookended by giant screens playing shots of New York, which overall does very little (but perhaps reminds the audience that all these Dutch-speaking men are really Americans).
Playing a foreboding composition by Eric Sleichim, a live string quartet at the base of the stage ratchets up tension as threats or moments of violence arrive. And they do. And they are unrelenting. The audience ripples with flinches and groans. Many close their eyes. Jude, in his increasingly bloody shirt, looks like a murder victim by the end; a few walkouts don’t stick around to see it.
I have been a staunch defender of Yanagihara’s book in the past, arguing that she had performed a marvelous literary trick in forcing the reader to will her main character to die. But watching the play made me wonder: was there anyone who wouldn’t feel something in the face of such misery and brutality? It began to feel like we were all being rather lazily manipulated; provoked more than anything. In the absence of Yanagihara’s undeniably masterful writing, A Little Life does feel less substantial. Why were we all here, I wondered, as we watched Jude slit his wrists for a second, third, fourth time. Did we hope for a test? Were we wanting to emerge from this somehow better for it, more empathic for the experience? Or just to be entertained?
After four hours, I had no answer. I did not feel richer for seeing A Little Life, or even very moved by it. Instead, I walked out with a deep weariness, stemming not just from watching a human suffer so much, but from knowing we had been summoned to do so, and agreed to it. A Little Life is an endurance test – but as in the aftermath of a marathon, when the thrill of the test is gone and you’re left to consider the toll, it can be hard to know whether it was good for you or not.
A Little Life is on until 8 March at Adelaide Entertainment Centre. The writer travelled as a guest of Adelaide festival
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org
