08/10/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Beamed live from the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End, A Little Life has recently been the subject of some controversy – not least the fact that its star, James Norton, spends much of the three-hours-and forty-minute duration stark naked. As a gruelling depiction of sexual exploitation unfolds, Norton’s performance is extraordinary, a genuine tour de force.

But there are issues that override that performance.

Jude lives in New York’s trendy Tribeca district and we’re to believe he is a high-flying lawyer (although we are never shown anything of his professional life). He has a trio of equally high-flying friends (a movie star! an artist! an architect!) and is – weirdly, at the age of thirty – about to be adopted by Harold (Zubin Varla), a wealthy professor, who sees Jude as the son he’s never had.

If this sounds too good to be true, don’t be fooled – because most of what ensues is frankly too bad to be true. Jude, it turns out, has endured a childhood of unbelievable cruelty. Abandoned as a baby, he is put into the care of sadistic monk, Brother Luke (Elliott Cowan), who – in the finest Catholic tradition – farms him out as a child prostitute. And it doesn’t end there. He stumbles from one awful experience to the next, exploited at every turn by a string of monstrous abusers (all played by Cowan). Could anyone really be as unlucky as Jude?

But here in the present day, people are queuing up to worship him! Willem (Luke Thompson), the aforementioned movie star, is deeply in love with Jude and wants the two of them to become a couple. But, because of those childhood experiences, Jude cannot enjoy anything like a healthy relationship, preferring instead to spend his time slicing himself open with a razor (something we are repeatedly shown in sickening detail).

Adopted from her own novel by Hanya Hanigihara, with the assistance of Koen Tachelet and the play’s director, Ivo van Hove, A Little Life is, it has to be said, cleverly presented. All the characters are constantly onstage, slipping effortlessly between the various scenes while, on two walls, slow-motion tracking shots of New York offer a sense of place.

But the story feels increasingly like torture porn, a relentless slice of sheer misery. I’m sure the highbrow audiences watching this play would never lower themselves to watch a film like Saw, for instance, yet A Little Life displays the same kind of world view, a callous and prurient invitation to wallow in somebody else’s misery. It feels manipulative, a coldly contrived feel-bad experience, which ultimately adds up to not very much at all.

A section of the audience is seated onstage, behind the action, presumably so that we can see our own reactions reflected in theirs. However, while many are holding handkerchieves to their faces, I feel curiously unmoved because it all feels too callous for comfort. Norton is terrific, but the vehicle he’s starring in really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

2.8 stars

Philip Caveney