Instead, I walked out with a deep weariness, stemming not just from watching a human suffer so much, but from knowing we had been summoned to do so, and agreed to it. I did not feel richer for seeing A Little Life, or even very moved by it. Did we hope for a test? Were we wanting to emerge from this somehow better for it, more empathic for the experience? Or just to be entertained?Īfter four hours, I had no answer. Why were we all here, I wondered, as we watched Jude slit his wrists for a second, third, fourth time. In the absence of Yanagihara’s undeniably masterful writing, A Little Life does feel less substantial. But watching the play made me wonder: was there anyone who wouldn’t feel something in the face of such misery and brutality? It began to feel like we were all being rather lazily manipulated provoked more than anything. I have been a staunch defender of Yanagihara’s book in the past, arguing that she had performed a marvelous literary trick in forcing the reader to will her main character to die. Dead when the story begins, Ana stalks the stage offering Jude advice and warnings, like a one-woman Greek chorus. Almost everyone in A Little Life, both on page and stage, is male, but Marieke Heebink as Jude’s first social worker, Ana, is a standout presence. Maarten Heijmans, Majd Mardo and Edwin Jonker are fine as Willem, JB and Malcolm, but the latter two often have very little to do. Steven Van Watermeulen is warm and fatherly as Jude’s mentor Harold, and Hans Kesting is impressively threatening, tasked with performing all of Jude’s abusers. Ramsey Nasr gives a remarkable performance as Jude, from open-hearted child to deeply traumatised adult. There is much to admire in A Little Life. At least in the Adelaide production, this can be a challenge, depending where you are seated: perched roughly in the middle of the stand, I sometimes found myself missing lines when the characters had moved to certain corners, my eyes having to travel a jot too far to keep up. It is performed entirely in Dutch, with English surtitles beamed above the stage.

This adaptation of Yanagihara’s 2015 novel is directed by Ivo van Hove, director of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, and adapted by Koen Tachelet. The New Yorker once called Jude “one of the most accursed characters to ever darken a page” but for Titus Andronicus’s Lavinia, or perhaps the characters of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Jude is easily also one of the most accursed figures to step on stage. And there’s Jude St Francis, an elusive lawyer with a limp and a mysterious past, the gradual and painful reveal of which drives the plot.

A little life description