Despite selling two-and-a-half million copies, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel ‘A Little Life’ has proven unadaptable into a television series, apparently because her story of four male friends whose lives turn out terribly has proven too depressing for TV execs (and Yanagihara has been intractable about watering it down).
No such problem for Belgian super director Ivo van Hove, whose Dutch stage version of ‘A Little Life’ has been kicking around for a few years now, and played a short season at the Edinburgh International Festival last summer. In 2023 it will debut in English language form, for a West End run starring James Norton as the story’s deeply troubled central character, Jude, along with Luke Thompson (Willem), Omari Douglas (JB), Zach Wyatt (Malcolm).
It’s definitely a ballsy production to be bringing to the West End, not least because it’s a long evening of theatre – though it has been trimmed down from the four-hour Dutch version.
