Skip to main content

A Little Life

Edinburgh International Festival Theatre

Festival Theatre

Five stars

 

What goes on behind closed doors between friends is nobody’s business but theirs in Ivo van Hove’s epic staging of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel. This sense of insularity permeates van Hove’s production, initially coming from the way the four college buddies at the core of Yanagihara’s story hang out and party hard while the world goes on outside.

 

What begins looking like a more regular rites of passage as Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm become successful in their fields takes a lurch even more inwards, with lawyer Jude becoming the centre of the action as his story unfolds. Over the next four hours, van Hove and co lay bare a relentless litany of sexual abuse that provokes a lifetime of self-loathing and self-harm, as Jude becomes the doomed heart of the relationship between the quartet.

 

Performed in Dutch with English supertitles, Koen Tachelet’s adaptation brings home the brutality of Jude’s self-hatred. This is made even more shocking by the stately and at times soporific pace of the production, the flagship of International Theater Amsterdam’s three-show EIF residency. The chic interior of Jan Versweyveld’s set lulls one into a false sense of security, as it becomes both confessional and torture chamber for Jude, as film footage of the city outside is beamed either side of the stage. The sink at the centre of the stage becomes a receptacle for Jude to wash away his perceived sins, while the slow-burning strings of the BL!NDMAN ensemble scrape out a foreboding accompaniment.

 

Most of all, it is the eight-strong cast, led by a fearless Ramsey Nasr as Jude, who make flesh of Yanagihara’s story. Maarten Heijmans as Willem, Majd Mardo as JB, Edwin Jonker as Malcolm and the rest of the cast possess a casual presence that can up the ante into something near unwatchable in an instant. By the end this has become a near religious purging for Jude in this harrowing dissection of a man damaged to within an inch of his life.

 

Until August 22 – https://www.eif.co.uk/events/a-little-life

 

The Herald, August 22nd 2022

 

Ends

 

 

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h
Post a Comment
Read more