When Jude St Francis cuts his wrists, the blood is thick, crimson and plentiful. As it drips on to the stage, the widescreen video flanking two sides of the set turns from crisp images of New York streets to angsty pixelation. Then a sepia dullness. The string quartet playing in the pit turns shrill and discordant.
This is not a show for the faint-hearted. Nor would you expect an adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel to be. Its 720 pages are an exercise in wretchedness, a relentless picking apart of wounds in which Jude, incessantly abused as a child, navigates an adult life in which everyone loves him, even as he hates himself. There are those who think it the best book ever written and those who find its obsessive detail, slow-burn revelation and melodramatic intrusions too much.
Compared with the original, Ivo van Hove’s staging for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam fairly skips along, even though, at more than four hours, it is the longest drama production in this year’s Edinburgh international festival. In two mesmerising halves, he takes us from the vigorous life of a band of wealthy young men to a painful stillness, as Jude is defeated not by the ghosts of his past but by plain misfortune.
Koen Tachelet does a brilliant job compressing the novel into a play, introducing us to Jude’s self-harming early on and allowing past and present to run in parallel, a reminder of an inescapable childhood. Heading an excellent cast, Ramsey Nasr is stoical and determined as Jude, a self-contained loner who gives his friends no special reason to love him. They do anyway. Frightening and all too believable, Hans Kesting morphs from one abuser to the next like an unshakable nightmare.
Van Hove keeps the life of the novel always in mind; the periphery of Jan Versweyveld’s open stage is a hive of cooking, painting and architectural design, giving context to the central story. Context, though, is deliberately absent in Yanagihara’s novel. Hers is a New York of privilege without politics. It means that, for all its insights into psychological damage, A Little Life forces us to wallow in misery, our sadness more indulgent than radical.
A Little Life is at Festival theatre, Edinburgh, until 22 August.
