“It’s a harrowing, compelling, epic story told in a compelling, epic way and I think Van Hove’s production takes all of that quite beautifully on to the stage. “I adored the book perhaps adore is the wrong word,” she said. Mainland, who saw the Edinburgh festival production earlier this year, described it as “harrowing, compelling, beautiful and grotesque”.

Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning And it is from Armfield, the former co-creative director of Adelaide festival with Rachel Healy, that the festival’s current chief executive, Kath M Mainland, has inherited this production. Scottish outlet the Herald gave Van Hove’s production five stars, but the Times gave it two, questioning the integrity of a play that “relentlessly punishes a character for our viewing pleasure”.Īnnouncing the 2023 program on Wednesday, the Adelaide festival is spruiking the play – which will feature the original Amsterdam cast – as a “gripping narrative” tracking the deeply intertwined lives of four men over more than three decades.įor many Australian theatregoers its length is comparable only to Neil Armfield’s adaptation of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet – which, when premiering at the Sydney festival in 1998, included meal breaks. While the Guardian praised the production, critic Mark Fisher warned that “for all its insights into psychological damage, A Little Life forces us to wallow in misery, our sadness more indulgent than radical”. When A Little Life was staged at the Edinburgh international festival earlier this year, critics and audiences were similarly divided. In 2018, International Theatre Amsterdam, under the direction of Ivo van Hove, brought the 720-page novel to the stage in a more than four-hour-long play performed in Dutch, which will make its debut in Australia at the Adelaide festival with English subtitles.

A little life novel