A Little Life ★☆☆☆☆

Reviewers have described it as “a relentless pile-up of pain and physical suffering”, a “self-harm horror show”, and “so bleak it borders on the unethical”.

I’ve never walked out of a show before. I once left a production of 1984 to vomit in the bathroom during the Room 101 Scene, and then I came back. I’ve watched a dodgy Hamlet in the pouring rain, and terrible school productions, and a ballet version of Edward Scissorhands which I’d thought was a musical. I once gave a show zero stars. However shocking or boring a show is, I’ve always stayed until the bitter end.

But after just an hour watching A Little Life, I couldn’t take it anymore. This play was violent, depressing, and excruciating to watch. It featured rape, child abuse including child prostitution, brutal violence, abusive relationships, self-harm, and suicide, presented in lurid and nauseating detail.

A Little Life follows the lives of four young men, university friends now pursuing glittering careers in New York. Jude St Francis, the protagonist, is a brilliant lawyer, who is peculiarly secretive about his childhood and personal life.

Jude’s reasons for secrecy are soon revealed: he’s traumatised by the violent sexual abuse he suffered for the first fifteen years of his life, which left him physically and emotionally scarred beyond repair. He’s disgusted with himself, and unable to talk about the events which haunt him. His friends are fiercely loving, but ultimately helpless to protect Jude from his pain: all they can do is witness it.

During one scene, Jude’s abusive ex-boyfriend tortures him in a scene of cruelty that bordered on the obscene. Jude imagines the voice of his social worker telling him, "You don't have to let this happen to you." And I realised, "That's true! I can leave at any time!"

Artist’s impression of me walking out of the theatre, after witnessing horrors I cannot bear to describe

My friends described the rest of the play, which runs to a staggering 3 hours 45 minutes, as “more of the same”, “an endurance test”, and “really depressing”. Reviewers have called it “a relentless pile-up of pain and physical suffering”, a “self-harm horror show”, and “so bleak it borders on the unethical”.

What is the point in depicting visceral suffering for hours and hours? What is one trying to prove by creating or viewing such art? Is it a test? Is it trial by ordeal? Is the love between friends more meaningful, or more intense, if one of them has been repeatedly raped as a child? Is it a manifesto for despair and self-harm? Is it pornography for sadists (or masochists)?

Whoever it’s for, they loved the novel. The original 800-page novel, which I haven’t read, is a cult classic. It conquered New York when it was first published: investment bankers sobbing in the bathroom at work, girls exchanging crying selfies. One fan said, “It allows us to feel overpowering emotion, but with no stakes.” Dua Lipa says reading A Little Life changed her, and it expressed “that sad but unconditional love of wanting to help someone but not necessarily being able to really get to the core of the problem.”

But I can’t see the appeal. The book might be a different experience — but watching this on stage, I felt a deep moral revulsion, a sense that a transgression had been committed. Perhaps it’s the hopelessness, or the gratuitous details, or the way we are invited to linger over Jude’s suffering. There's something sordid about it. Like setting a romance novel in a concentration camp: it cheapens suffering to witness it in certain ways.

It's often possible to look for the beauty, or poetry, in something horrific. But I'm not sure that we ought to. Some things we should flinch from.

A Little Life is playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 18 June.

Postscript

I’ve given a negative review because the hour of this play I witnessed was miserable and unbearable. The acting/staging was good, and James Norton gave an impressively vulnerable portrait of Jude which must take incredible resilience to pull off, night after night. No wonder they have a therapist onsite. If you have different moral sensibilities to me, you might be glad you saw it, even if you won’t enjoy it per se. If you liked the book, you may like the play.

Here are two reviews of the original novel which I found interesting:

• Hanya’s Boys: The novelist tends to torture her gay male characters — but only so she can swoop in to save them. Andrea Long Chu, for Vulture

• A Little Life: the best book, or the worst? Peyton Thomas and Frankie Thomas, for The Niche