A Little Life (NHB Modern Plays) - The hit stage adaptation, as seen in London's West End Paperback – 11 May 2023

The best book I have ever read.

A must read for people who love a good drama

After absolutely falling in love with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, I was waiting for my husband to have an MRI scan when an email popped up announcing the Screenplay. I quite obviously dived straight over to Nick Hern Books and preordered it without a second thought.The screenplay is quite different to the book in the sense of its not as long, there are many details left out (which is obvious, they can’t squeeze a 25 million page book into a 3 hour stage show). But it took nothing away from the main focus on the storyline whatsoever. I haven’t seen the stage show as I’m faaaar away from London (sunny old Newcastle), but I really want to see it when it comes to the cinema. If you followed me reading A Little Life Novel, you’ll know how much I love it and that it’s pretty much my favourite book I’ve ever read. You get every single emotion possible while reading it. I didn’t cry reading the screenplay, but I did get emotional and slightly misty eyed. I feel the stageshow would be amazing though.Again, thanks Hanya for destroying my soul, and thanks to Ivo Van Hove and Koen Tachelet for bringing the screenplay into my life.

In the Author’s Note, Hanya Yanagihara describes the recreation of a writer’s work as a ‘chimera’, ‘something she both recognizes and doesn’t’. The task of condensing a 720 page novel into eight scenes of three and a half hours stage time is formidable and there are inevitable gains and losses in Ivo van Hove’s adaptation.The absolute genius of a masterstroke is what van Hove has done with Ana. Jude’s social worker dies on page 160 of the novel, although she recurs as more of Jude’s story is revealed. In the play she remains a real presence on stage long after her physical death. Even more in the play, it makes no sense to talk of ‘flashbacks’ in ‘A Little Life’: what Arthur Miller called the desire to capture ‘the mind’s simultaneity’ on stage, ‘to see present through past and past through present’ is exactly what the expressionist staging achieves here. So Ana becomes variously the good Angel/conscience, the narrator, the voice of Jude’s inner prompting. Her choric function is reinforced by transposing the narrative voice in the novel into Ana’s mouth in the play: she has the ‘fairly tale’ story of the woman on the edge of the dark forest—once the monsters, goblins are inside ‘she will never be able to make them leave’. This use of Ana is a brilliant way of articulating Jude’s inner life and of justifying Yanagihara’s description of the play as a ghost story: ‘I can be at the movies with Willem,’ says Jude, ‘and suddenly, a scene appears of the years with Brother Luke, the months with Dr Traylor, a scene from the crash, the glow of the headlights, my head jerking to one side’. The play preserves the novel’s dramatic tension and tantalising structure by revealing its dark secrets only as gradually as Jude’s memory will allow.There are moving and beautiful moments in the novel which are differently moving and imaginative here. In the novel Willem’s ‘whispered incantation’ willing Jude to recovery, ‘so close to [Jude’s] ear that it is as if the voice is originating inside his own head’ (607), becomes an entire scene (VII.4), a litany shared with the characters the book is in love with (Andy, Harold, JB, Malcolm) but the play mostly doesn’t have time to develop.A masterstroke that is unfortunately not recorded in the playtext’s stage directions is the way van Hove has translated the novel’s persistent interest in food into a sensory experience on stage: there is a working kitchen on stage right, from which food is cooked and consumed throughout. (Likewise, you actually smell the Dettol that is used to clean up blood.)Inevitably, the play telescopes the novel into some (admittedly teasing) snapshot characterisation. Willem: ‘Allegedly good-looking, according to white heteronormative standards. Serial womanizer. Actor’. The character of Andy is flattened into a one-dimensional medical functionary in the play (losing something of the novel’s interrogation of just how complicit Willem, Harold and Andy are in Jude’s suffering). And neither on stage nor on the page am I wholly convinced by the play’s ending: the final scenes too episodic and rapid. (Happily, the one really badly judged stage decision, the cumbersome machinery which does now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t with Jude, is also not recorded in the stage directions.) The expressionist staging is clever (we never leave the apartment but the scene changes) but the play feels more stifling than the novel.The script knocks on the head the inflated accounts of play or novel as a catalogue of horrors. Yes, the play is about atrocity. The abuse, inflicted and self-inflicted, is terrible—all the more stark on stage in Jude’s bloodstained shirt and the Deposition-like staging. But it also captures the piercing sweetness and the redemptive possibly of love and friendship: like ‘King Lear’, which I thought of most when seeing it in performance, that redemption is crushed with a hard-headed brutality (realism?). But it lingers long after the material defeat. The play’s pared-down focus on the two central characters accentuates this.The book is unusually handsomely produced for a modern play: four of ‘JB’s portraits‘ (by artist Eniwaye Oluwaseyi) are produced as colour plates inside; the cover is enriched by TM Davy’s portrait of the four college friends. You do a slight double-take: from a distance, a photograph; on closer inspection an oil painting. Reading the play is like a satisfying double-take on the novel.

Arrived with a bunch of weird gunk and marks on it. Pretty upset as this is a gift for a friends birthday and I don't have time to get a replacement