Rubbish on the streets, not on the stage. Excitement arrived unpredictably during my 2022 Edfest: not from blasts of new work but from adaptation and revisitings.
I did not skip into A Little Life, Ivo van Hove’s stage version of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel. Though its plot follows the lives of four New Yorkers, its central subject is abuse and self-abuse: it pivots on the plight of one of the men, who, violently assaulted by priests and the non-godly, cannot trust enough to be intimate – and cuts himself to take charge of his pain. Van Hove’s adaptation is four hours long and in Dutch (with surtitles). I was sceptical about the director’s idea that he was adapting not a book but “an excess”. What does that mean? Why should fiction’s remit be narrowed? Does turning a volume into an abstraction allow it to float above examination?
