Although the plot’s focus on the shaping of personality due to a traumatic childhood could easily fit within Edinburgh’s Fringe, A Little Life‘s scope, scale and running time of four hours demonstrates a clear difference between the International Festival and its multitudinous child. Ivo van Hove’s direction of a script adapted from a novel has its own musicians in the pit, a huge video screen, a kitchen and bathroom on stage, while its languorous narrative, punctuated by moments of sudden violence, expresses a theatrical confidence.

^{Pictures: JShurte}

Following the lives of a successful group of friends (work-wise at least) and centred around Jude, a victim of horrendous childhood abuse, A Little Life asks questions about the consequences of trauma across decades. It fades between past and present, occasionally bursting into terror but lingering on the aftermath: Jude’s character is a detailed study in self-hatred and longing. His experiences at the hands of Christian Brothers torments him, in the face of popularity and intellectual brilliance.

Eschewing predictable theatrical beats, this challenges the possibilities for the stage, moving at a measured pace and revealing mundane consequences as vividly as those moments of action. A demanding work, it ironically fails to account for Jude’s popularity; he is more an object of pity than attraction, wandering through a life but replacing dramatic affect with grotesque blood-letting and a fascination with the detail of emotional and physical injury.

Reviewed at Festival Theatre as part of Edinburgh International Festival.