An epic bore: A Little Life, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is set in a New York apartment shared by four mega-successful yuppies: an architect, a fine artist, a film star and a Wall Street attorney, Jude, played by James Norton. A friendly doctor tags along occasionally and an older lawyer, in his sixties, joins the gang after legally adopting Jude.

None of the men has a partner or a family, and they never discuss things like sport, cars, investments, movies or girls. Instead they hug a lot and cook pastries for each other in a kitchenette on stage. The play feels like a joke-free episode of Friends with an all-male cast. And the script might have been written by a teenage girl. The characters say things like, ‘I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you’, ‘Does it bother you that I still hang out with him?’, ‘I forgot to get you a birthday present’ and ‘I love you.’

After an hour of spineless chitchat, the play moves into a sad phase. Jude, we learn, is an orphan who was raised in a monastery by paedophile friars who liked to thrash him unconscious with metal belt straps. After one particularly gruesome rape, he rushes into the garden and decapitates Brother Luke’s daffodils, one by one. After graduating from the friary, Jude uses his sexual skills to become a rent boy. One of his clients smashes a bottle of Prosecco over his skull, as if launching a battleship, and rapes him on a hospital bed. Poor Jude. He deals with the trauma by cutting his forearms and refusing to eat. Like a teenage girl.

Norton has to spend most of the play staggering around the stage in a shirt soaked with blood because the scars left by the brutal friars keep reopening and weeping.