Ivo van Hove, one of Europe’s most in-demand directors, says Britain’s politicians should learn from its theatres how to behave post-Brexit, claiming they are setting a “very good example”.
The Amsterdam-based Belgian director, who regularly works with British theatres and next weekend is taking his production of A Little Life to Edinburgh international festival, said he believes Brexit was “historically a mistake”.
Yet theatres and cultural institutions were refusing to be stopped by any added technicalities, he said. Instead, they were continuing and even intensifying collaborations with other European countries.
“Theatres and other cultural institutions gave a good example by keeping collaborations going on with European artists when there was Brexit. They didn’t stop it,” Van Hove, 63, told the Observer.
“Nobody stopped a collaboration. On the contrary, they intensified a lot of collaborations. The theatre and the arts worlds are a very good example to the politicians [of how] to keep it open.”
Van Hove has been leading the way. So far this year he has directed The Human Voice starring Ruth Wilson at the Harold Pinter theatre, brought his Internationaal Theater Amsterdam production Age of Rage to the Barbican, and next weekend will mark the UK premiere of his stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel, A Little Life.
While he said “it’s clear that Brexit was wrong”, and suggested jokingly that it should be reversed, he felt that Europe was acting in “a very drastic way … it’s really a shame”.
“Brexit is historically a mistake. But that’s my opinion,” he said, adding the caveat that he was a Belgian living in Amsterdam and working in London. But he believes that many artists in the capital feel the same way.
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, his collaborations with British theatres continued through Brexit. While “it’s a little bit more difficult to get to London” than it was, the problems were not insurmountable.
British theatre producers such as Sonia Friedman, the “super producer” behind the worldwide hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and To Kill a Mockingbird, which transferred from Broadway to the West End in March, have continued to “behave the same way they did before”, he said. “Nothing changed for me there.”
As he prepares to reprise his production of A Little Life, which will be performed in Dutch with English subtitles, he admitted he was originally reluctant to read the lengthy 2015 novel which follows the lives of university friends Jude, Malcolm, Willem and JB, and tackles subjects including trauma, abuse and suicide.
Although he had seen its famous cover, which features the black-and-white Peter Hujar photograph Orgasmic Man, in bookshops around New York, where he was working at the time, he thought it was “just another gay coming-of-age story”. But after it was recommended to him separately by two of his best friends, he felt compelled to read it. Soon after, he was sucked into its “dark abyss” and couldn’t look away.
In another turn of fate, just as he started looking into the logistics of bringing the novel to stage a month later, he received a third copy of the book – this time from Yanagihara – with a “beautiful” note telling him she would be “honoured” if he adapted it.
“I was shocked by it, I was devastated by it, I loved it at the same time,” he said. “Just that she cared, that Hanya cared, to tell a story so cruel but that you can’t get away from. That’s the strange thing about the novel – you can’t get away from it. Even when you want to stop, you just can’t stop reading it. A miracle.”
What attracted him to the story was the description of abuse – “I never saw a description so haunting, so precise, so detailed” – and its story of friendship.
“I think it tells us that love doesn’t conquer all. That love is not the ultimate solution to things so deep, so hurtful as a traumatic sexual experience.”
For a long time, he has been unable to take the production to the UK or other English-speaking countries due to a rights issue. As reported by the Observer in February, the novel was going to be made into a television series.
Now he is finally able to take it to the Edinburgh festival, which he describes as “one of the greatest festivals in the world”, before taking it “home” to Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in October.
Despite being a time of crisis – from the cost of living to pandemics, the climate and war in Ukraine – he said the story remained timeless and universal.
“Of course we live in times of war, depression, financial crisis, a crisis in nature, things like that, but people still go to the theatre to connect deeply to other human beings,” he said. “To go to a ritual. And this is really ritualistic … It cleanses you a little bit.”
He is unafraid to tackle dark subject matter. “I only do things that seem to me urgent to tell on stage,” he said, adding that the urgency must be both personal and societal.
Giving the example of Picasso’s painting Guernica, which thousands of people visit every year, he said: “Why do people go specifically to Madrid to see specifically that painting? I think that’s what art does to people. You look into the face of what you are yourself deep down, because we all have something of an animal in us, nobody is a real saint, there is nobody only a real villain, there is always something more delicate about it, but we need to see the extremes in art.”
