Hanya Yanagihara’s sprawling, relentlessly graphic door-stopper of a novel about sexual abuse and self-harm divided the room when it was published in 2015. Some called it torture porn, others hailed it a masterpiece. So it is perhaps not surprising that its West End adaptation began making lurid headlines well before opening night.
Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove, first in Dutch and now premiering in English, there have been reports of spurting blood, fainting fits and illicit mobile phone images of a naked James Norton, who plays the central, agonised figure of Jude St Francis. That last one has sparked debate on the potential banning of phones inside auditoriums. What kind of logistical mayhem might that cause? Will theatregoers be asked to go through airport-style scanners? And all with no guarantees a phone will not be smuggled in anyway.
The nudity is hardly shocking in the mix of it all, and comes so often that we feel inured to the sight of men – mostly Norton – slipping out of their trousers. Where Yanagihara faced some charges of appropriation in her depiction of male friendship and gay desire, that criticism cannot be applied to this adaptation by Koen Tachelet, Van Hove and Yanagihara. The consensual sex, when it comes, does not seem gratuitous.
The story follows Jude, an orphaned child who, taken in by monastic Christians, is groomed by Brother Luke (Elliot Cowan, chilling) and violently raped by paedophiles over several years. He escapes at 15 only to fall into the clutches of a sadistic doctor (also Cowan, even more chilling). There is plenty of spurting blood, as per the headlines, but it has a ruthless integrity to it: the production is asking us to consider the effects of abuse, across a lifetime, with all its horrifying repetition.
We shuttle between Jude’s present, beginning at the age of 28 when he has become a brilliant lawyer in New York, and his monstrous past, which continues to stalk him. Brother Luke is a rock-solid spectre in Jude’s adulthood, striding beside him, ambushing every moment and showing, vividly, how a survivor of child abuse can become trapped by perpetually relived trauma, even when he is surrounded by love, as Jude is here by his friends Willem (Luke Thompson), JB (Omari Douglas), Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), and adoptive father Harold (Zubin Varla).
There is something heroic in the staging of this story in the West End: resolutely bleak with no catharsis and cyclical violence, it is an almost anthropological study of pain. It is staged with utmost intelligence too: moments of pitched emotion are accompanied by the nerve-jangling sounds of violins and cello; a rolling film-scape of New York’s streets on either side of Jan Versweyveld’s set brings an implacable forward movement as we march through Jude’s life and its inescapable suffering.
But for all its sophistication and searing qualities, it is a discomforting production. The gripe, for me, lies with Yanagihara’s original story, the shortcomings of which become all the more jarring on stage. Jude is not spared any extremity of pain and misery, it seems, and the serial abuse to which he is subjected continue to adulthood, reinforcing inevitability around the notion that an abused child stays the abused adult. There is a vague, bilious sense that even his friends recognise his “abused” personality and perhaps find ways to exploit it, however covertly. JB, a painter, makes Jude a subject of his art despite Jude’s expressed wish otherwise while Willem tells him “You’re so damaged” as he kisses him.
Although Norton convinces as Jude at every stage, his character is a cipher in itself – a patron saint of pain, an obscured Jude who is wholly defined by his abuse (he wears a bloodied shirt for most of the show). He becomes a Christ-like figure in one scene in which he is beaten – and then, with arms spread, his pummelled body is lifted off the ground, as if ascending. “We all look the same when we cry,” someone says, and it is this obliteration of the individual in the face of a blank, erasing pain that grates. Jude is nothing more than his tears, never the hotshot lawyer that we are supposed to believe him to be.
And where Yanagihara’s book followed the trajectories of Jude’s friends to paint a compelling picture of their love towards Jude, here we only see flashes of this camaraderie and warmth, which leaves the story less textured, more unremittingly focused on abuse and its legacy. The set’s open-plan layout – office, art studio, kitchen, hospital, bathroom and lounge – exposes all the characters’ lives at once and many remain on stage, in their own worlds. But they appear marginal, superficial, schmaltzy, despite this presence. There is a cursory glance at tensions between Jude and JB, brilliantly played by Douglas, but he stands painting for the most part, which seems like a waste.
We are positioned as jurors of sorts, bearing witness to all that is done to Jude. A small swathe of the audience is seated on the other side of the stage. This seems symbolic, as if they – we – are not only there to watch the drama unfold but also as mirrors, reflecting the passive pain of witnessing. Ultimately this returns us to the same central contention around Yanagihara’s novel: is this a story that wallows in the horror of bearing witness, or one that dares to look that horror unflinchingly in the face?
A Little Life is at Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 18 June
