How much is too much? The question recurs a lot during “A Little Life,” the theatrical pileup of suffering and woe that opened on Wednesday at the Harold Pinter Theater in London. The play is beautifully acted but surpassingly bleak, and spectators may find their own threshold for trauma tested more than once. I know mine was.
Telling of a New York City lawyer who seems to know very little but pain, this is the English-language debut of a much-traveled Dutch-language production, directed by Ivo van Hove, that reached New York last year. That version was first seen in 2018 at the International Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director. To create the English adaptation, he has joined forces with the Dutch dramaturge Koen Tachelet and Hanya Yanagihara, the American writer on whose 2015 novel the show is based. (Yanagihara is also the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)
This latest iteration — which runs at the Harold Pinter through June 18, then transfers to the Savoy Theater until Aug. 5 — has been selling out and generating tabloid headlines, not least because the show’s fast-rising leading man, James Norton, appears naked for extended sequences.
But far more noteworthy is the grievous state in which we find Norton’s character, Jude, whether clothed or unclothed, pretty much throughout. “You’re so damaged,” Jude’s longtime friend-turned-lover Willem (a sweet-faced Luke Thompson) tells him, in the understatement of the night.When Jude does undress, we see a body disfigured by scars. Self-harm, rape, lashings, child prostitution, attempted murder: Jude has known it all. No wonder the play’s website comes with an elaborate content warning and the offer of “post-show support resources.”
Yanigahara takes 720 pages to tell the story of four college friends whom we follow through their precarious lives — though Jude’s is the most awful: Willem, a womanizing actor, is his best buddy; then there are J.B. (Omari Douglas), a prickly painter; and Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), an architect who comes from family money.
It’s not the fault of Douglas or Wyatt, both fine actors, that J.B. and Malcolm seem to fade from view as the play proceeds. A feisty J.B. drives the opening scene, set at his 30th birthday party in Lower Manhattan, but is soon relegated to painting in silence on the periphery of the designer Jan Versweyveld’s multipurpose set, which manages to accommodate a kitchen, a hospital room and an art studio in one tall space.
Video footage of New York either side of the stage provides a sense of place lacking from the script. And although the play’s events span decades, there’s hardly a mention of politics or culture, as if these topics might detract from the misery unfolding across nearly four hours. (This version is a half-hour shorter than the Dutch one.) An exception is Jude’s fondness for one of Mahler’s “Rückert-Lieder,” which begins with the line, “O garish world, long since thou hast lost me.”
Yes, Jude does experience kindness: He is adopted as an adult by his former professor, Harold (an elegant Zubin Varla), whose wife, Julia, has been excised from the stage adaptation.
And he finds a companion and ally in Ana (the expert Nathalie Armin, the play’s lone female role), a social worker who helps him push through his concealed trauma.
Mostly, though, you just watch as Jude rolls up his sleeves and takes a razor to himself yet again. The production owes an enormous amount to Norton, a likable and attractive stage-trained TV star in a role that playgoers might otherwise recoil from, and this performance is sure to be a contender for the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.
But I couldn’t help nodding in agreement when Willem remarks in the second act that he is “sometimes surprised” that Jude’s still alive. You emerge stunned at the sheer mercilessness of it all, but moved? By the acting, yes. But not the play.
A Little Life
Through June 18 at the Harold Pinter Theater, then July 4 to Aug. 5 at the Savoy Theater, in London; alittlelifeplay.com.
