Just as medieval peasants sought escape from their humdrum lives by gawping at lurid paintings of bleeding saints, so modern audiences are flocking to A Little Life, a gruelling, blood-soaked narrative of one man’s suffering. Ivo Van Hove’s epic, bladder-testing, nearly four-hour adaptation takes all the pain in Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel and re-enacts it in graphic detail. Its star James Norton is pretty much constantly drenched in blood, often naked, and always being either psychologically or physically tortured. I could feel the people around me sobbing and covering their eyes and sometimes I did too. But I also felt manipulated by its naive and psychologically incurious narrative of abuse.
It centres on Jude, who’s got a full house of traumas: repeatedly raped and tortured by monks as a child, emotionally and physically abused as an adult. As he goes through adult life, he tries to form a normal life as a New York lawyer, going to hip parties with his mostly gay group of friends: Willem (Luke Thompson, who develops beautifully from coolness to warmth), JB (Omari Douglas) and Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), as well as his adoptive father Harold (Zubin Varla). Still, his self-destructive impulses constantly drag him back down into misery.
