A Little Life

Directed by Ivo van Hove
Based on the novel by Hanya Yanagihara
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Belgian stage director Ivo van Hove works across Europe, the UK and the US with companies like the Young Vic and the Comédie Francaise as well as commercial productions on Broadway. However the International Theater Amsterdam (formerly the Toneelgroep) – where he’s been Artistic Director since 2001 – is his primary artistic home and creative laboratory. 

 

Above all, his work with ITA demonstrates the value of his long-term collaboration with other creatives – in particular set and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld, video artist Mark Thewessen, sound designer Eric Sleichim and dramaturg Bart Van den Eyde – as well as a permanent ensemble of actors. Of course I speak as a humble Austrian emigré, but there seem to be few such theatre companies here in Australia, and our main stages seem to be the poorer for it.

 

Van Hove’s productions with ITA are often adaptations of novels or screenplays – as well as existing plays or cycles like Shakespeare’s Roman Plays or History Plays – that re-interpret the original works from the ground up in terms of their form and meaning. They typically use spectacular yet minimalist staging (there’s often little or no furniture except when absolutely necessary), with unconventional audience configurations and live-feed or pre-recorded video as crucial elements of the set design, as well as a low-key, understated acting style. To facilitate this, the cast use body-mics, wear contemporary clothes no matter where or when the play is set, and are often in bare feet or stripped naked as part of the action. 

 

Theatrical abstraction, realism and a heightened sense of ritual sit side by side in van Hove’s aesthetic. The emotional tone and style of his productions alternates between ice-cold and white-hot; and their execution (in every sense of the word) is always rigorously disciplined and highly controlled no matter how violent or cruel their assault on the audience’s senses. As such there’s something profoundly Classical about them that harks back to the Ancient Greeks and other non-Western traditions like Japanese Noh drama. 

 

A Little Life is based on Japanese-American author Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel about a group of male friends in New York City. The narrative slowly tightens its focus on the central figure, Jude, and gradually reveals itself to be about childhood sexual abuse and trauma, ongoing physical and emotional abuse, chronic pain and disability, self-harm and suicide (the list of trigger-warnings outside the theatre was probably the most comprehensive I’ve ever seen).

 

As an orphan delivered into the ‘care’ of a monastery, Jude is initially tortured by the monks, before being kidnapped by Brother Luke, who kidnaps him with the false promise of being his friend and protector and then forces him into years of sexual slavery. After being rescued by the police he's made a ward of the state and subjected to further abuse by counsellors; escaping this, he becomes a hitchhiker prostituting himself to truck drivers; finally he's picked up by Doctor Traylor, who gives him antibiotics to cure him of venereal disease and then locks him in a basement and abuses him sadistically, before driving over him with his car and leaving him with permanent injuries to his legs and spine. 

 

Despite being nurtured by his case worker Ana (who is dying of cancer), his college friends (especially Willem, who eventually becomes his lover and carer), his law professor Harold (who adopts him as a son), and his doctor Andy (who treats his ongoing ailments and self-inflicted injuries), Jude remains trapped in a cycle of self-harm and the underlying conviction that he's unworthy of being loved. This is exacerbated when he falls prey to another abusive relationship with Caleb, a fashion executive who repeatedly beats and rapes him before eventually throwing him down the fire escape of his apartment and leaving him for dead. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Jude accepts Willem’s offer of a relationship but is unable to enjoy sex; after an emotional struggle, Willem accepts this on condition that Jude tell the truth about his past. The two of them settle down to a brief period of happiness together; but more tragedy lies around the corner, and Jude’s travails are far from over.

 

Despite being shortlisted for numerous prizes, the novel divided critics and readers, and was decried by some as ‘trauma literature’ or ‘torture porn’; more than one friend of mine hated the book and/or found themselves unable to finish it. I personally felt its detailed account of abuse and self-harm – and their effect on Jude as well as everyone in the novel who loves or endeavours to help him – was in no way gratuitous or exploitative, but on the contrary revealed something profound about the ongoing ramifications of trauma for everyone affected by it either directly or indirectly.

 

Van Hove and his creative team have adapted Yanagihara’s 800-page chronicle into a four-hour work of ‘slow theatre’ (with one interval) which is similar to the effect of reading the novel in terms of duration and rhythm – as well as the form of attention required from the audience. The adaptation also includes long stretches of exposition which are more or less lifted from the novel and put into the mouths of the characters, so that the action is less dialogue-driven than narrative-driven – in other words, more like a novel than a conventional play. However, in contrast with the deliberately measured tone of the novel, van Hove’s production is much more confronting and brutal.

 

The audience is seated on either side of a traverse stage, with video screens at either end showing non-stop slow-motion footage of New York City streets. This is occasionally tinted by a pink filter or pixelated to become visual static during the later scenes of abuse or self-harm, which all occur centre-stage.

 

A live string quartet sits below the stage on one side of the traverse and plays various pieces during transitions between scenes – most notably a repeated version of the slow introduction to Mozart’s ‘Dissonance Quartet’. Music and sound are also conveyed through speakers placed around the theatre; and the actor-characters also play records on a stereo which is positioned on the opposite side of the traverse and forms part of the furniture in the apartment shared by Jude and his friend (and later lover) Willem. 

 

The dialogue is in Dutch, and the actors all use body-mics, but surtitles in English are projected on either side of an inverted structure that hangs suspended over the stage and contains the lighting grid. This structure also plays a spectacular role in a typically van Hovean coup de théâtre at the climax of the play. 

The effect of the surtitles is a bit like watching a foreign-language film, and one soon ceases to notice that the actors aren’t speaking in English. In any case, although the action is predominantly set in New York, with flashbacks taking place around the rural heartland of the United States, one feels that it could be taking place almost anywhere – or more precisely, right here – that is to say, wherever the play is being performed.

 

Like Yanagihara’s novel, Van Hove’s production gradually turns up the heat, until what initially appears to be a generic story about a group of post-college friends becomes a slow-burning spectacle of carnage. In fact the cast spend much of their time either preparing and cooking food on a functioning stove-top at one end of the stage (which they eat in front of the audience during interval) or cleaning up stage blood that’s been visibly released from plastic bags taped to Jude’s body and dripped or leaked onto the floor during the scenes of self-harm and abuse (though his shirt remains soaked and stained with it for the duration of the show).

 

As such the production progresses stylistically from Stanislavskian naturalism to Brechtian alienation effects to a kind of Artaudian theatre of cruelty – where ‘cruelty’ is to be understood not merely in terms of physical violence or sadism (though these certainly feature in the story) but as a form of representation that transcends language, abolishes distance and exposes the audience to something dark and destructive at the heart of human nature. 

 

All of this is inhabited with a paradoxical sense of lightness and ease by the uniformly excellent ensemble cast – some of whom have been working with van Hove (and each other) for decades. Dutch-Palestinian actor Ramsay Nasr gives a carefully measured and distilled performance as Jude; Hans Kesting is monstrously convincing in his serial incarnation of Jude’s abusers, his transformative physicality and transfixing gaze mesmerising and terrorising Jude and the audience from one character to the next; and Marieke Heebink calmly haunts the stage as Jude’s dead social worker Ana – who in this adaptation is the only female character in the story, and who in van Hove’s staging accompanies Jude like a guardian angel during some of the most extreme scenes of abuse and self-harm. 

 

In fact both the adaptation and staging tighten the narrative in terms of the underlying masculine dynamics that drive the story and relationships. For example, whereas in the novel Jude is adopted as an adult by his former law professor Harold and his wife Julia, who both become loving parents to him, in this version the character of Julia is omitted, making Harold’s interest in Jude potentially more ambiguous. The same is true of Jude’s doctor Andy, whose seemingly endless capacity to administer medical assistance while preserving confidentiality about Jude’s acts of self-harm almost comes to seem like a form of enabling. 

 

The increasingly ritualised staging suggests that beyond the representation of abuse as something to be understood physically, psychologically, socially and institutionally (all of which Yanagihara extensively documents in her novel), for van Hove there seems to be a theological (or perhaps a-theological) dimension to Jude’s suffering (it’s no coincidence that his namesake is the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing), as he’s repeatedly and systematically reduced to a state of abjection that resembles the sufferings of Job or the Passion of Christ – an analogy which is surely alluded to by the copious amounts of blood onstage. In this regard the play becomes a parable about cosmic injustice and the torment of the innocent, with the audience as complicit witnesses in lieu of an implicitly absent, indifferent or cruel God – a tradition that harks back to the ancient tragedies of Euripides and Seneca and is recapitulated in the perverse visions of Pasolini and De Sade.

 

This perspective in no way absolves us from our own ethical or political responsibility for what unfolds on van Hove's merciless stage. Compared with the solitary act of reading the novel, watching the play induces a sense of collective guilt and moral injury on behalf all who suffer injustice and oppression – victims of physical or sexual abuse; people with disabilities; sexual, racial and cultural minorities; First Nations peoples and asylum seekers. Beyond the consolations of love or piety, van Hove’s theatre of cruelty exposes us to what might be called our shared inhumanity, which no amount of sacrificial blood can wash away. Acknowledgements and reparations are all very well, but the cycle of abuse and trauma, rinse and repeat, also needs to stop.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations),Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.