Adelaide Festival. International Theatre of Amsterdam. Adelaide Entertainment Centre. 3 Mar 2023
No fear if one hasn’t read the celebrated Hanya Yanagihara novel. No fear if one doesn’t speak Dutch.
While recalling their Festival triumphs, Roman Tragedies and Kings of War, we have come to appreciate the International Theatre of Amsterdam because their epic sur-titled works are as comprehensible as they are comprehensive.
They also are fearless and uncompromising, most explicitly in the case of their latest offering, A Little Life.
This Ivo von Hove production is utterly gruelling and profoundly bleak. It tells of a man called Jude so damaged by the cruelty and exploitation he suffered in childhood that, despite his immense IQ, he is unable to surmount a sense of juvenile filth and defilement. Nor is he able to trust in confiding to those who care for him. Hence, his adulthood is ravaged and relentlessly self-destructive.
The audience must share in his dark humiliations, taken on a vividly harrowing four-hour voyage into a squalid world of depravity and gratuitous cruelty.
It is made all the more affecting by the presence onstage of the characters who are his friends and would-be protectors: the teacher who adopts him as an adult and the doctor who repeatedly treats the ravages on his body.
The play is delivered from a transverse stage in the Entertainment Centre Theatre whence, from bleachers on either side, there is a rare excellence of sight-lines.
In a kitchen at one end of the long stage, good and reliable Harold, impeccably portrayed by Steven Van Watermeulen, is quietly and steadily preparing and cooking meals. Homely aromas waft across the audience. The play’s characters dip into his cooked fare.
They are friends who have lived or spent time together, time being another sort of moveable feast in the play since many years are covered and not sequentially.
Andy, the doctor, played with compassionate exasperation by Bart Slegers, has his clinic at that far end of the stage.
Along the perimeter are inbuilt sofas and easy chairs wherein sweet Willem resides when he is at home. He travels a lot. He is Jude’s emotional anchor and, perchance, hope, and is given a very simpatico characterisation by Maarten Heijmans.
JB, portrayed by Majd Mardo, is a painter and another dear friend. His studio is set at the other end alongside the office of architect Malcolm played by Edwin Jonke.
These all are Jude's circle of long-time buddies, and also his present.
But his past stalks the stage in the form of the characters of Jude's godforsaken childhood.
They are sinister and deceptive and, well, just awful. Hans Kesting takes the burden of these merciless swines, depicting them with eerie charm and ruthless brutality. He is a fine actor, as are they all in this Dutch production, including as counsel and voice of reason, the one woman Marieke Heebink.
But this is Ramsey Nasr’s four hours of glory.
His portrayal of Jude St. Francis is utterly monumental. His power as a performer is supreme. His endurance is daunting. His emotional potency is devastating.
He takes the audience to the depths of self-harming perversity. Jude’s ordeals are their ordeals.
He is shamelessly contemptible while heartbreakingly naive.
It is a searingly punishing show. Man’s inhumanity towards man and the inexplicably uncompromising libidinousness of so-called men of the church are among its themes. Not all the characters are gay but it is essentially a play about homosexual men and the dark side of the secrets of some.
Above all, it is a phenomenal piece of theatre and a sensational Festival production from those genius fly-in Dutchmen.
A live string quartet sits beside the high stage in the Entertainment Centre theatre and the soundscape they produce, composed by Eric Sleichim, rides as an eloquent companion to the extraordinary action upon the stage, sometimes deeply underscoring the drama of the moment, sometimes flitting lightly in the air of the auditorium. It is a sophisticated marriage, which, doubtless, is why this composer is off to London to work on the score for an English-language version of this very Dutch production of an America-based story written by an author of Hawaiian, Korean, and Japanese descent.
And this is the stuff of our times.
Ah, but there is more for audiences at this Adelaide Festival experience.
There is a sensational high-tech denouement to this great theatrical tragedy. No spoilers, but deus ex machina isn’t in it.
And thus does the critic go “Wow”.
Thankyou Adelaide Festival of Arts.
Samela Harris
When: 3 to 8 Mar
Where: Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
