A Little Life

The great Belgian director Ivo van Hove and his Internationaal Theater Amsterdam company have a residency at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival: a real treat, even if it’s down to just two productions after ‘The Magic Mountain’ had to be cancelled for technical reasons. Still, that leaves us with two exciting looking shows: ‘The End of Eddy’, an adaptation of Édouard Louis’s autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a tough corner of rural France. And then there’s ‘A Little Life’, Van Hove’s version of Hanya Yanagihara’s epic novel of trauma, that follows four university friends’ struggles in the decades after graduation. Brace yourself for a doubtless brilliant but also gruelling evening: that running time alone is enough to make a grown man wince.