Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is coming to the Adelaide Festival
Trigger warning: A four-hour stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s wildly successful and deeply disturbing novel A Little Life is about to open to Australian audiences. How will they react?
When Ivo van Hove’s 2020 update of the classic musical West Side Story was previewing at the Broadway Theatre in New York, an indignant grandmother bailed up the director, who had been quietly watching his production from the back of the venue.
“She had brought her granddaughter to see the production that had moved her so much when she was very young,’’ recalls the giant of experimental theatre, opera – and increasingly, of multimillion-dollar Broadway productions. Before long, he says, the grandmother “crossed into, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’. The granddaughter came a little bit later and said, ‘I really loved it’.’’
Van Hove chuckles at the memory of the elderly patron telling him off – it’s a rare moment of levity from the Tony and Olivier-Award winning director, who speaks with the clipped intensity of a man who feels pressed for time, during our phone interview. “My productions, our productions, create different reactions,’’ he says. “I think that’s a good thing. It means that it’s not average, anyway.’’
“Average” is the last word that comes to mind when describing van Hove’s oeuvre, which has seen the 64-year-old Belgian become one of the most in-demand directors working across Europe, Britain and the US. This is despite the fact his epic works – which have featured buckets of blood, nudity, simulated castration and human sacrifice, and a small herd of real cows – have often divided critics and audiences.
The auteur’s West Side Story revamp marked the first time an American production of the beloved 1957 Bernstein musical ditched the original choreography of Jerome Robbins and featured gigantic video projections and performers with neck tattoos and hoodies. It earned mixed reviews, with some critics welcoming van Hove’s modernising twists and others feeling underwhelmed, partly because they felt the performers were upstaged by their screen avatars.
Van Hove’s Age of Rage, a visceral indictment of war, was a mashup of seven Ancient Greek tragedies and opened with one character – in a symbolic act of vengeance – barbecuing the body parts of his brother’s children. Performed at the Barbican in 2022, it also featured a heavy metal band and a large mud pit, and earned rapturous reviews. So did his West End and Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s domestic tragedy, A View From the Bridge, which played up the transgressive erotic charge between the middle-aged male protagonist and his wife’s teenage niece, and concluded with a bloody rain. This show went on to win two Tony Awards, including best director, in 2016.
Now, the serial provocateur is bringing to the Adelaide Festival his four-hour stage adaptation of one of the most successful – and polarising – novels of the 21st century, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Since it was published in 2015, this 736-page novel has sold more than a million copies and been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The American novelist’s operatic tale of intense male friendship, graphic child sexual abuse and extreme PTSD has been praised as “astonishing” and a “masterwork”, with The New Yorker declaring it “an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship’’.
A Little Life has also been denounced as “trauma porn” because of the detailed way in which Yanagihara explores the childhood sexual violations inflicted on her protagonist, Jude St Francis, along with his adult predilection for self-mutilation. As New York Times theatre critic Naveen Kumar recently wrote: “The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as ‘the great gay novel’ and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs … But its reputation has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive.’’
Van Hove firmly rejects that view of Yanagihara’s novel, arguing that “even when it’s very extreme, it is also very human and very recognisable. And that’s probably what attracted me when I read the book. I thought, ‘I want to show the beauty and the ugliness of how people can be’.’’
The longtime artistic director of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, whose productions tour the globe, van Hove has taken this show – which will be performed in Dutch in Adelaide – to the Edinburgh Festival and to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When we speak, he has just started rehearsals with the production’s first English-speaking cast, led by Happy Valley star James Norton. That production is due to open in Britain in March and has already sold out.
The director admits A Little Life “is, of course, an epic book, it’s 730 pages, which is quite hard to bring into the stage’’. The man who introduced his six-hour Shakespearean marathon, Roman Tragedies, to Adelaide in 2014 and Kings of War, an amalgam of five of the Bard’s history plays, four years later, says the novel and play “tell two stories actually, which are both extremely interesting’’.
The first is a classic coming-of-age tale as four male university friends, including Jude, head to New York to make their mark. All of them – an actor, painter, architect and Jude, who is a lawyer – are remarkably successful in their professional lives. That story, van Hove says, is about “people who really care for each other’’.
A Little Life’s second narrative – its “dark side” – is revealed slowly. At times, the director says, Jude “cannot walk anymore. But we don’t know why and he doesn’t want to tell why. And we discover slowly that he was the victim of an extreme and structural, physical and sexual abuse from when he was seven until he was 15.
“And this will traumatise him for the rest of his life. Even these extremely good friends are not able to give him comfort or to solve this trauma. When you’re the victim of such terrible, sexual transgressive abuse, that is a death penalty in life.’’ He says that against the odds, “Hanya Yanagihara has managed to turn this – unimaginably but true – into a worldwide bestseller. I don’t know the secret but people also (come) to the theatre production.’’
Despite grim scenes in which Jude is beaten and sexually abused or seen mutilating himself, the director says, “it’s not that we play for empty houses all over the world. And we do it in Dutch.’’At BAM, he says, “we were playing for over 1300 people every night. So something is there that’s very human’’.
Like the later reactions to Yanagihara’s book, critics’ reactions to van Hove’s show have been sharply divided. The Financial Times described it “as gruelling yet (as) compulsive as Hanya Yanagihara’s source novel’’, while Kumar called the production “a kind of endurance test” in which the play’s abused and self-harming Jude eventually “looks like a walking murder scene’’.
Several reviewers reported that on opening night at BAM last October, some audience members walked out midway through the show but van Hove disputes this. He says this was more a case of overwhelmed patrons – some of whom may have been sexually abused – taking breaks and returning to see the rest of the production.
“We get a lot of reactions, of course, and during the performance, sometimes people have to go out for a second. We allow them always to come back to the moment,’’ he explains.
“So it has some triggers in it. And for people who have experienced it (sexual violation), it will certainly have a lot of triggers in it and we always have a warning that this is gonna happen – extreme violence and things like that.’’
Dutch actor Ramsey Nasr plays Jude, and van Hove points out that, “in the Netherlands he won the best actor of the year (the Louis D’or) award (for the role). It’s an amazing part that he plays and he must also be fully dedicated to it because it is a huge challenge. It needs a very skilled and also very professional actor.’’
He says Nasr’s protagonist is “from the first minute until the last minute on stage, the others come and go so he is intensely there and he has to make it believable, that he’s living through this trauma every night … He has also been very open to me when he said sometimes, ‘Let me have a break’. I never crossed a border that he didn’t want to cross.’’ (Nasr played Henry V in van Hove’s acclaimed 2018 festival show, Kings of War.)
Van Hove often uses innovative video projections in his shows and A Little Life features slow-motion shots of strangely empty Manhattan streets. His long-time partner and frequent collaborator, Jan Versweyveld, designed the show’s set, lighting and video, while Belgian writer Koen Tachelet adapted Yanagihara’s novel.
I ask the director about one review, published in USA Today, that accused him of “rubbing our faces in Jude’s physical and psychological devastation’’.
“I don’t mind,’’ he answers mildly. “Reviews are reviews and everybody is free to write down his or her opinion … I accept some people think differently.’’
He stresses that a serious point underlies Jude’s self-harming, that despite the efforts of his devoted friends, the lawyer is unable to outrun his past traumas, which stalk and overwhelm him. He reflects: “You need to face your traumas, the darkness of it, in order to heal; Jude never gets to the point that he can heal but it’s because (he suffered) not only sexual abuse but also physical abuse. He’s almost crippled at certain moments and that makes it even harsher.’’
Self-mutilation for this character “is like a high; he is happy at those moments. For him it’s not pain, it’s the opposite of pain – it’s relief. It’s relief from tension and that’s why I thought this was so crucial in the book.’’
He adds later: “There is a beautiful saying in Latin – amor vincit omnia. Love conquers all. But in this case, Hanya makes clear that even love cannot conquer all.’’ Nevertheless, he stresses his take on A Little Life is “not only darkness and violence’’, but an exploration of friendships that evolve over three decades.
In recent years, van Hove has brought his uncompromising style of theatre to four Broadway productions, including The Crucible and West Side Story.
Asked whether he feels pressured while working on such big-budget, high-stakes shows, he replies flatly: “I don’t feel pressure on Broadway.’’
This was the case even when he worked on West Side Story, “which was huge”.
On the other hand, he says “it’s fantastic to be able to play for so many people’’ and that he is “very proud” of his work within one of the epicentres of world theatre. He says there is a misapprehension “people come to Broadway shows only for pure entertainment. On the contrary, also now these days the pure entertainment productions all have to close after a few weeks. It’s the productions about something that stay open at this moment.’’ (In fact, Phantom of the Opera is the longest-running current show on Broadway, and a 1996 iteration of Chicago is in second place.)
The son of a pharmacist, van Hove is from a small village in Belgium. He trained in The Netherlands and when younger, he “never expected” to work on marquee productions in New York: In May, he will make his Met debut with a production of Don Giovanni.
In another career first, he has been signed up by Warner Bros television to work on an American television series called Doll. It’s a psychological thriller set in a modern music conservatory and he says of it: “I was blown away by the script – overwhelmed – it is so beautiful and it’s really something that I can relate to, because it also talks about the opera world and opera singers as well. It’s situated in New York, a city I love. So all the things were there for me I couldn’t refuse, I couldn’t say no to this.’’
Saying “yes” to a show just for the money is not something he does. “I’m not for hire,” he says bluntly. If he doesn’t feel a sense of “urgency” about a show, “I just don’t do a production’’.
He has been the artistic director of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam since 2001, and this company enjoys rehearsal and development periods that would make Australian theatre makers weep. “We prepare our productions extremely well,’’ he says. “We start normally for a production one year and a half, up to two years before we realise it.”
He won’t be visiting Adelaide for A Little Life’s season because he is caught up rehearsing the British season of the show. “I’d love to be there but I can’t go,’’ he says.
While he acknowledges his adaptation of Yanagihara’s novel can be confronting, he has not had any “angry” reactions to the production. “There’s nothing that we do that’s not in the book,’’ he says. “I hope it’s as intense as in the book, because you also have to be horrified by it. If you like what you’re seeing, it’s not good I think.’’
A Little Life runs from March 3 until March 8 at Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre.
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