Een klein leven
In A little life, we watch four men over a period of more than thirty years: lawyer Jude, actor Willem, visual artist JB and architect Malcolm.
The story is the history of their friendship, as they remain closely connected with each other during the rest of their lives. They develop their careers in the city where ambition and success are the indicators of a successful life: New York. The main character is the introverted Jude. His past is wrapped in a veil of mystery. Behind the façade of professional success, he lives with unresolved grief as a result of structural sexual abuse during his childhood. It has left him with extreme distrust and a feeling of worthlessness. He finds release in compulsive automutilation, causing his body to become more and more exhausted.
How do you live with trauma and pain? Jude has no family, his friends are everything to him. Nevertheless, he finds it impossible to share his past with them. The closer someone gets, the more difficult it is for him to talk about it. For Jude, openness and surrender are equal to abuse. In a constellation like that, intimacy becomes an impossible task.
Can friendship provide compensation for the incurred damage? Is it possible to have a romantic relationship without sex? What is love actually able to do? Jude’s friends are facing a dilemma. How can you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, while realizing you’re not a real friend if you don’t try to help?
Ivo van Hove: direction
Hanya Yanagihara: author
Eric Sleichim : music composition and sound design
Koen Tachelet: dramaturgy
Jan Verzweyveld: scenografy en light
An d’Huys: costumes
BL!NDMAN [strings]
Stefanie Van Backlé: violin
Femke Verstappen: violin
Monica Goicea: viola
Suzanne Vermeyen: cello
ITA ensemble
actors
Agenda
Ivo van Hove:
“Reading A Little Life is much more than reading a book. It is a devastating descent into areas of pure pain, pure loneliness, pure helplessness, pure friendship. Iceily sincere but also loving, albeit without any sentimentality, Hanya Yanagihara describes an entire life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, death. From the first abuse at the age of nine, Jude lives in that moment of trauma for the rest of his life. A trauma in which he is totally alone, feels totally alone. For Jude, redemption is not possible. Not for nothing is his anthem Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen/ Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben, I am lost to the world to which I once spent a lot of time. His friends do all they can to make Jude happy but he can no longer embrace the good. Love and friendship do not conquer all. A Little Life asks questions about right and wrong, about how to cope with losing who you really love. But also at the contemporary tyranny of being happy, at the connection we automatically make between love and sexuality. In A Little Life, sexuality is a destructive force.”
Hanya Yanagihara:
“Ivo and I talked a lot about A little life. He saw the book as an allegory of good and evil. I didn’t see it like that at all. During our first conversation, he talked about his ideas about how he wants to transport the book to the stage. And that is exactly what I’m curious about when someone wants to adapt the book to another art form; how will they use their medium to tell the story. It has to be an interpretation, not a literal translation. The book requires total surrender from the reader. And it will be the same with the play. This is the case with all of Ivo’s work. The stage adaptation of A little life will invite the audience to be humble, attentive and actively involved. The spectator will be challenged. And he will be rewarded. I hope this play will let people see the book in a new light. Maybe I will also see the book differently. Thanks to adaptations like Ivo’s play, the book and its characters are given a much longer life than I originally expected. I consider that a great gift.’