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. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he´ll not only be unable to overcome but that will define his life forever.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.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they´re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.
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