The book “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara of roughly 700 paperback pages has captivated both critics and broad readers.
The novel about four friends from a small university who move to New York to pursue careers contains themes of friendship, sexuality, ethnicity and childhood trauma with an emphasis on sexual abuse and self-injurious behavior.
Several critics praise James Norton’s acting as destructive Jude, the person the story revolves around. But three and a half hours on stage with portrayed trauma is, according to common criticism, too long.
The Financial Times calls it “deeply confusing”, Variety writes that the audience does not get a break from the trauma and that the compromise in the stage set resulted in some characters being reduced “to little more than extras”.
In the British The Times, the reviewer writes that the play “can inevitably reproduce only a fraction of a book that stretches over 700 pages” and in The Guardian the production is called “unfunny”.
The New York Times review concludes with the observation that “the threshold of how much trauma one can handle is put to the test. It certainly was mine”.
“A small life” is played for twelve weeks. The set is Dutch director Ivo van Hove’s debut in English. Previously, he staged the same play in Dutch.