The only person who thought A Little Life was not that bad
From the following options, choose the most horrific thing that happened to me this week:
a) Going to the theatre to watch A Little Life.
b) The moment my daughter reached into her coat pocket and drew out a USED COTTON BUD, then proudly told me she ‘found dat outside nursery’.
It’s b, forever b.
Weirdly, I didn’t find A Little Life that bad. Perhaps because the build-up had been so full of dire warnings – emails from the Harold Pinter theatre about the horrifying ride ahead, reports of paramedics outside the original performances and so on – that I was mentally prepared to leave halfway through on a stretcher. I tried to explain to my friend Holly, who hadn’t read the book but was joining me “to see James Norton naked”, that this was going to be a hellish experience. In fact, the more I read in the press, the more I wondered if I should just jack it in altogether.
The thing is, I am incredibly squeamish. It's hard been a delicate little flower like me these days, when everything is full of violence. I first realised quite how weird I was when I had a full on panic attack at the cinema watching 12 Years a Slave, and have since turned off loads of popular TV series, from Game of Thrones to Peaky Blinders, due to excessive gore. I would’ve been a crap Roman.
But while there has been enormous hoo-ha over the graphic nature of A Little Life - several instances of self-harm are played out quite vividly on stage - what happens in the play is nothing compared to the gratuitous violence, sadism and brutality on numerous TV shows and films these days, and no one seems to bat an eyelid at those.
Of course, A Little Life is grim. It would be hard to adapt a novel that is about child abuse, domestic violence, self harm and death for the stage and not make it rather downbeat. And I can think of few things less sexy than the context in which James Norton, playing Jude, gets his kit off (sorry Hols). In fact, it is Norton’s amazing acting and willingness to go to places of vulnerability that would have most of us moving to the Hebrides that carries the whole thing.
When I read A Little Life in 2015, I cried so much someone probably should’ve made an intervention on the tube. I was even crying for days after I finished reading it. In comparison, I genuinely didn’t find the stage version that scarring. Although after sitting through the four-hour performance, my main takeout was that we need to make a national rule that all plays and films should be under two hours, and books under 400 pages.
On that note, I’m done.