Ivo Van Hove’s dramatization of Hanya Yanagihara’s divisive novel A Little Life took to the West End this summer, with a brief stint at The Harold Pinter theatre before moving to the Savoy Theatre. A divisive and controversial novel, A Little Life has been accused of being some form of torture porn, whilst others instead hail it as a profoundly impactful portrait of the vestiges of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. As I took my seat this June in the Harold Pinter Theatre, I was intrigued to see how the arduously lengthy novel (720 pages no less) would find itself transformed into a 3-hour 40-minute production. The dynamic staging, starting initially as the shoddy apartment of Jude and Willem in Manhattan’s Lispenard Street, saw itself transformed into; a doctor’s office, the home of Jude’s adoptive father Harold, and the basement of one of Jude’s abusers – the sadistic Dr. Traylor. A string quartet huanted the background, providing dissonant, screeching strings emphasising any moments leading up to the graphic acts of self-harm. This was performed with convincing wince-inducing skill by the play’s star James Norton, and a contrasting soft, low humming during reprieves in this tension. Interestingly, a portion of the play’s audience was seated upon the stage, facing down towards those in the main stalls.
My initial impression of the play, upon reflection, stirred this nagging doubt in my mind that I would detest it: it launches into action, the delicate development, and revelations of Jude’s past discarded, replaced by a dizzying plot that jumps into different moments in time without warning. This dramatic attempt to streamline the plot is understandable, but somewhat disappointing. The quasi father-son relationship between Jude and Harold lacked any real development, and the characters of Malcolm and JB were relegated to perfunctory roles and further served as a lacklustre part of our protagonist Jude’s life, with no real depth of connection. For me, the novel’s strongest moment of emotional impact is when JB, struggling with addiction and on the verge of a paranoid breakdown, lashes out at Jude by stumbling across the room, imitating his limp, and contorting his face into a terrifying imitative grin, when he suffers one of his frequent bouts of back pain, due to an attack by Dr Traylor in his past. In this moment, the safety of Jude and JB’s relationship fractures entirely, leaving Jude, and readers alike, reeling from this rare moment of Jude being forced to acknowledge his physical disability from an outside perspective. Jude and JB’s falling out cleaves open and carves out a sinewy, painfully visceral representation of the more nuanced consequences of the manifestation of childhood traumas. More simply, it is painful because of the betrayal of a man Jude chose to let in because he thought he was finally safe. Yet this was not as an impactful a moment when set on stage.
The emotional grey shades painted by Yanagihara herself in the novel were stripped back and made entirely black and white. The physical manifestation of the oxymoronic parts of Jude’s own mind (angel and devil, id and superego, hope and despair, whatever does it for you), were found in his social worker Ana, and Brother Luke, played by Eliot Cowan. The nuance of the relationships between Jude and his friends is what could be seen as making Yanagihara’s novel justifiable by the glimmers of hope and joy that are found within the adult life Jude makes for himself, but I found the play provided a more monolithic depiction of trauma. The play’s narrative concludes in a death that felt much less surprising than it did when first reading the novel, and upon reaching this ending I felt myself considering the plot as a retrospective justification of the inevitability of his suicide. The novel, however, gave more space for the reader to hope for the characters. It gave them the ability to watch Jude’s yearnings for happiness and security, thrash it out with the cold, hard, unshakable influences of his past. Jude’s ascension at the end of the play secures his position as a martyr. His blood saturated shirt further symbolising the fact he finally reached his capacity for tragedy.
At the end of the play, I felt emotionally and physically drained, bereft, and stunned by the visceral and gory portrayal of Jude’s suffering. As Yanagihara once said about the novel, the play also has ‘everything turned up a little too high’, it is a sensorily impactful play, with its staging, sound and acting creating an overall oppressive sense of futility and hopelessness. Some would argue that it is superfluous and artificial, but it could also be said that the play succeeds in capturing the essence of the novel whilst delivering it in a didactic and impactful way. Overall, Norton dazzles in his emotional range, managing to capture the naivety of an infant, to the wizened wisdom and anguish of a man who has known many things, but who is suffering first and foremost. Eliot Cowan stunned in a tricky role, portraying each of the abusers in Jude’s life, done with such skill that it rendered him entirely unrecognisable whenever he re-entered the stage as a new character. Theatrical catharsis was undoubtedly achieved, and the harrowed, politely quiet tone amongst the theatre goers as we all shuffled out of our seats went to show how far it resonated, or at least shocked.
