Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
James Norton, Luke Thompson, Omari Douglas, Elliot Cowan
Intro:
… this complex work has managed to forge anger into art.
There is no getting around the subject of this sad scary play from the NT Live series. Be warned, this is a tough watch. Usually, content warnings are either obligatory, unnecessary or are anyway ignored. This time, people might really want to be forewarned, especially if they have sexual abuse in their past or in their friends’ past.
As indicated, this is one of those London theatre productions now getting a limited theatrical release. It’s another chance to catch world class drama in the cinema. It is based on a novel by Hawaiian/American author Hanya Yanagihara and is directed by long term London stage director Ivo Van Hove.
A Little Life revolves around four young American men and their friendships and gay love affairs. When we first meet them, they are at that flat sharing stage of life. We soon find out that, though they regard themselves as a bit of a band of brothers, there are tensions both over who is going to make it, as well as who is attracted to whom.
Initially, it is JB (Omari Douglas) who seems to be the main character. He is a precociously talented painter who raids glimpses of his friends to make eye-catching portraits. He looks set to become an established artist, but we are also made aware of the fickle nature of the art world he hopes to become established within.
One of his main objects of desire is his flatmate Jude (James Norton). As the play’s focus shifts to Jude, we realise not only what a complicated character he is, but how much trauma is a lifelong influence.
Jude has a spinal injury that may yet put him in a wheelchair, but for now, the play is more interested in his invisible scars as an abuse survivor. Later, the two injuries will be dramatically linked in a way that compounds the pity and terror that the play draws out of us.
Norton shines in the role. He plays Jude in so many different aspects of his life. It is a riveting performance, both brave (not least for the frequent vulnerable onstage nudity) and extremely touching. It is a long way from the foppish types he sometimes plays in British historical soaps/dramas.
The staging of the play is also both fluid and skilfully handled. There are so many scenes and settings that need to be portrayed, including flashbacks and overheard conversations, intimate exchanges, and large group scenes. Hove and his team have blocked this out thoughtfully (and this is made more complex because we can see the action is staged ‘in the round’).
This pacing and mixture of foci helps to break things up. Though the play is very long, it is absorbing all the way through. At certain scenes, the audience (in the cinema as much as at the occasion being filmed) is dead silent and hanging off every word.
So, back to the themes and the trigger warnings; the play has to characterise (and even portray) the perpetrators as well as the victims. Here, it is worth stating that the work does not spare the Catholic Church, especially the priesthood. The details of what some priests did, even as relayed in dialogue, are so confronting that you just want to shut it out of your mind. The element of it being a systemic problem also compounds our sense of grief and revulsion. Perhaps the one and only consolation is that this complex work has managed to forge anger into art.
