Ivo Van Hove on the theatre of trauma: ‘It’s devastating, in a good way’

When theatre director Ivo Van Hove first picked up a copy of A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling 2015 novel, he had no intention of staging it. “I started reading it against the odds. I thought, ‘Another coming-of-age story about four guys in New York, I know this,’” says the Belgian director, with a wry smile. “So I thought: no. Then, after a while, I took my pencil . . . ”

The result is a show that has already played, in Dutch, to packed-out audiences across the globe. It now has its English-language premiere in the West End, led by James Norton, fresh from his outstanding performance in the BBC TV series Happy Valley and swapping arch villain for victim.

Anyone who has read Yanagihara’s book will know that it’s far more than your average coming-of-age story. Starting out in college-buddy territory, it is soon spiked by something far darker as it becomes clear that one of the men, Jude, is deeply scarred both physically and emotionally by horrendous childhood abuse.

For the next 700 pages it’s a tug of war between the forces of love and despair as those who love Jude fight to preserve him from the black hole of his experience and its legacy. Ever since publication, the novel has divided readers and critics: it’s sold more than 1mn copies and been hailed by many as a great, moving novel, but its harrowing catalogue of abuse and self-harm has also been criticised as “trauma porn”.

Van Hove, like many, describes a “rollercoaster of emotions” while reading it: “It’s hard to read, at the same time you can’t stop reading it, then you have to stop reading . . . I think it’s a masterpiece. There’s something elemental in it.

“It is hard to stage,” he adds. “For the actors it’s very demanding . . . We had a run last Friday, just in the rehearsal room, not very romantic, no lights. And I know the play by heart now, I know every little corner of it. But even then, I had a moment where I broke down. And at the end I looked around — everyone was in tears. It’s devastating, in a good way. It does something. It’s visceral.”

He cradles his coffee cup and gazes out of the window. We are in a busy café in south London, just across the road from the Young Vic theatre, where, in 2014, Van Hove staged his superb, heartbreaking production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. It exemplified the combination of aesthetic rigour and electric, raw performance that has earned him an international reputation.

He’s since become a regular fixture on the London stage with his company Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, directing soaring epics, such as the six-hour spectacle Roman Tragedies and the more recent Age of Rage, drawn from Greek classics. There have also been distilled domestic dramas: Hedda Gabler starring Ruth Wilson, and the tough yet unbearably moving Who Killed My Father?, based on Édouard Louis’s autobiographical novel.

A Little Life is somewhere in between. Its scale alone is a challenge: epic in length, it covers several decades. Yet unlike those mighty political sagas, this story is intimate and timeless, in some senses cut off from the outside world: it seems to unfold in a sort of perpetual 21st-century present.

“In my first meeting with Hanya, she said, ‘Actually, it’s a fairytale. It’s a story about an orphan who is found, then he is in the middle of the woods, and he encounters good people and very bad people.’ That helped me. I didn’t direct it as a fairytale. But it’s not realism — that’s what it meant for me.”

On stage, he and his collaborators, including his partner, the designer Jan Versweyveld, have sought to translate that hothouse mix of scale, intimacy and emotional intensity into theatrical language by fusing Jude’s past and present onstage.

“Jude has a horizontal life like we all have — every day is another day — but he also has a vertical life,” says Van Hove. “Always he is in the moment of the trauma. And that became crucial for the adaptation . . . I want to give people the experience to be in the story, not looking at it.”

It’s not a horror show. It’s a story about someone having a real, hard, essential problem and the life-long consequences of abuse’

The toughest issues by far, however, are the abuse and the self-harm. Gradually, the novel reveals that Jude was subjected to horrific sexual violence as a child. These atrocities destroy his ability to believe he is worthy of love and he regularly cuts himself with a razor blade. It’s very difficult to read. How do you stage it responsibly?

It needs to be limited, but authentically dreadful, not aestheticised, replies Van Hove: “I decided to do it economically: at specific moments and only a few times. But when it happens it needs to be horrific — without it becoming a horror movie. The music plays an important role. And the cutting is as if it is real. But you see it only a few times.”

The actors have access to a therapist and have become very close as a group. The show itself comes with multiple trigger warnings. Even so, in the Dutch production some audience members fainted or walked out. Van Hove says the intention is not to traumatise anyone but to travel, communally, through a cathartic process. He emphasises too the importance of love in the story, particularly the enduring love of friends.

“It’s not a horror show. It’s a story about someone having a real, hard, essential problem and the life-long consequences of abuse. But it’s also a story about love, about deep, real friendship and about parental love [Jude is adopted as an adult]. In my production, parental love is very important.”

He believes that Yanagihara writes with real tenderness about male friendship, something he cherishes. He lost his best friend last year and it’s a grief that clearly still sits deep with him. “[He was] very young — 62 only. And it was really quick. Within a year he was dead. And that’s real loss. I think real friends — it is the best thing in the world.”

An actress once observed to Van Hove that his relationship with theatre was like a marriage. It’s a passionate one. Based in Amsterdam and working across the globe, he is absurdly busy. But he still talks about theatre as if he had just fallen in love with it. His work acts as “a kind of autobiography”, he says: every project is driven by a sense of urgency. “I always say, If you want to know who I am, look at all my productions from when I was 20 until now.

“Sometimes I wonder why I chose to do theatre . . . I could have been a lawyer making much more money,” he says smiling, having originally studied law. “But I found I can express what I think, what I feel, about myself, about people that surround me, the world and how I see it. I can dream, in the theatre, of the lost paradises, of the utopias, which are not here.

“It’s great to explore the anger that we have, the love that we have — and it’s beautiful, you know? All these things can happen in the safety of the rehearsal space. I think that’s brilliant.”

‘A Little Life’, Harold Pinter Theatre, London, March 25-June 18, then Savoy Theatre, London, July 4-August 5, atgtickets.com

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