A Little Life 
Harold Pinter Theatre

If your stomach turns at gruelling acts of paedophilia, man-on-boy rape and the gushing blood of self-harm, this play is not for you. 

On the other hand, if you value a brutally graphic, visceral, relentless journey into the dark centre of one man’s soul, you’ll stay and tough it out. It’s an epic tale of almost allegorical significance which rises far above what might initially seem like a catalogue of gratuitous misery.

And James Norton of Happy Valley inhabits Jude, the lead, with a self-effacing and tender display that converts before our eyes to one of sacrificial splendour. 

The play, adapted from Hanya Yanagihara’s Booker-nominated novel of the same name, is profoundly experiential. Over almost four hours, it draws its audience into the shocking reality of a child abused by those he should trust, denied love in any form from the outset, treated as a commodity and systematically trashed as a human being. The damage is irreparable; the slightest morsel of self-worth eradicated. It is an uncompromising voyage into the shaping of a life. And though love eventually seeks Jude out and offers him redemption, the die is cast and the psyche immovable. 

Iconic director Ivo Van Hove, together with Yanagihara and Koen Tachelet, created the play and Van Hove’s wild and creative imagination melds with designer Jan Verseweyveld to bring us a production of distinction. The set alone is intrinsically subversive with its stark central single-pedestal wash basin – the recipient of vomit – and, on either side of the stage, the continuously rolling footage of barren urban streets where human presence is marked only by its absence: the world merely a vacancy where a person should be. 

Meanwhile, three rows of audience looking on from upstage remind us that this is a theatrical tale, meant not just as one man’s sad and desperate story but as a public exposition of the wind-blown garbage that can be a human life. 

Live music from an interestingly all-female string quartet – continuous like the video footage – somehow replicates Jude’s fractured mind and lost identity and renders the whole a vivid artistic construct. 

The power of the performances, though, and the assertion that, as all else fails, only love and kindness can be our saviour lifts the play from overwhelming misery. Luke Thomas, Omari Douglas, Zach Wyatt, Zubin Varla and Emilio Doorgasingh together make for a superb antidote to all Jude has experienced and individually radiate star quality. 

Elliot Cowan expertly creates more than one of Jude’s powerful and arrogant abusers and Nathalie Armin is the one feminine voice that brings a kind of sanity to this fearsomely animal, cruel and dominating, all-male world. 

The play’s ending often seems predictable as we watch, but, in the event, keeps us guessing and draws from us gasps and involuntary cries. At half-time, we feel ground down by a gruesome reality; at full-time we emerge changed and enlightened. 

This is a production of true originality and bravery that impacts on us all. Top-notch performances and already a sell-out. 

Runs until June 18; box office: 03330 096 690 / 0800 912 6971, haroldpintertheatre.co.uk