A Little Life, Harold Pinter Theatre & Savoy Theatre

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Belgian director Ivo van Hove helms the first English language stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel A Little Life. The production, running in the West End from Saturday 25 March to Sunday 18 June 2023, stars James Norton (Happy Valley, Grantchester) as the story’s troubled hero Jude, with Bridgerton's Luke Thompson, It's a Sin's Omari Douglas and The Witcher's Zach Wyatt playing his close friends Willem, JB and Malcolm.

Beginning when the friends are at university, the story takes us back through their pasts, with a particular focus on Jude’s traumas, before observing how these events shape the men they become.

This is not the lauded Belgian director’s first crack at the story. In 2018, his company Internationaal Theater Amsterdam ran a version of it in Dutch, which was revived last summer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, this star-led production, previewing at the Richmond Theatre (Tuesday 14 - Saturday 18 March) before its three-month run at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre, sees the story performed in English for the first time.

So, what can we expect? Yanagihara’s novel is known for its beautiful portrayal of friendship, but also for its relentless peddling of dark themes including child abuse, rape and self-harm. Van Hove, meanwhile, is famous for his experimental, brooding works, which in the last year have included an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s tale of one-sided heartbreak The Human Voice and an epic trek through Greek mythology, Age of Rage.

While the finer details will remain hush-hush until the show opens, with the book notching up 800 pages and van Hove’s Dutch production clocking four hours, we’re expecting a lengthy run time.

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