Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Think of A LITTLE LIFE, Starring James Norton?

The stage production of the million-copy bestseller by Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, has now opened at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

Starring James Norton, Luke Thompson, Omari Douglas , Zach Wyatt, Elliot Cowan , Zubin Varla, Nathalie Armin and Emilio Doorgasingh, Ivo van Hove's production runs until 18 June.

The story follows four college friends in New York City: aspiring actor Willem, successful architect Malcolm, struggling artist JB, and prodigious lawyer Jude.

As ambition, addiction, and pride threaten to pull the group apart, they always find themselves bound by their love for Jude and the mysteries of his past.

But when those secrets come to light, they finally learn that to know Jude St Francis is to understand the limitless potential of love in the face of life.

What did the critics think?

Photo Credit: Jan Versweyveld

Cindy Marcolina, BroadwayWorld: The events don't have time to breathe and hit the audience like they should because the company bestow them at an impetuous speed due to obvious timing reasons. A lot is sensibly omitted - from entire figures to situations that only solidify the small details - but one feels the topics shown are left underanalysed. The script ambles between dialogue, narrative, and inner monologue, swiftly going from one to the next with Shakespearean ambition. It largely works, but comes off as a forced artifice used to slide the story along painlessly. Poetic peaks follow clipped exposition while the actors address the crowd like a narrator would the reader.

Clive Davis, The Times: The play, inevitably can only deliver a precis of a book that sprawls over some 700 pages. Sometimes the pace reminded me of the unhappy stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor epic The Mirror and the Light. The other obvious problem is that the storyline — including the bleak twist at the end — is so implausible. Strip away the gore and the gossip about Norton’s private parts, and what do you have? A stylishly mounted, second-rate melodrama.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: Van Hove, whose adaptation was created with Yanagihara and Koen Tachelet, offers us an experience that feels closer to the dogged fatalism and catharsis of Greek tragedy. Leaner, nimbler and, with designs by Jan Versweyveld, visually indelible, this stage version liberates the twisted fairytale at the heart of the narrative, becoming more of a fable, more powerfully symbolic and less tangled in extraneous detail and portentous pontificating. It is so harrowing as to be nearly unbearable, yet it rarely wallows. In fact, it is a production of cool temperature, handling atrocity with clinical precision, and moments of grace with an economical elegance.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: Arriving, nervously, at Ivo van Hove’s three-hour 40-minute stage adaptation belonging to neither fan-base, I had no idea what to expect. But I left shaken and stirred by a production that is as involving and accurate a depiction of the long-term effects of abuse as you could expect to see – if still slightly doubtful about whether I had wanted to see it at all.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: 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.

Alice Saville, The Independent: Yanagihara’s perspective seems to be that abuse messes you up for life, making emotional intimacy almost impossible and suicide the only way out. Van Hove’s production reinforces that, creating a production that’s so painful to watch that, like Jude, you wish it would all just stop. But it’s both a hugely irresponsible message, and a false one. Real-life suffering is more complex, interspersed with moments of joy, care and healing – and recovery is too precious to give up on.

Andrzej Lukowski, TimeOut: To his credit, Van Hove never makes it feel pulpy or trashily exploitative, more of a meditative treatise on how life is unutterably cruel and shit. But in doing so it becomes a sort of experiment in terror, an attempt to see how an audience will react to seeing unimaginable horrors piled upon a single character with almost nothing in the way of relief. There’s some seating at the back of the stage and I wonder if its main purpose is so we can see the shocked faces of our fellow audience members' faces.

Average Rating: 60.0%