THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
This is Ivo van Hove's English language translation of Hanya Yanagihara's critically acclaimed, prize-winning, novel. The original Dutch language version made a stir at the Edinburgh Festival last year where it was presented by his own company, Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam.
Van Hove is of course one of the world's leading directors and has found acclaim first in Europe and more lately in the West End and Broadway. Often attracted to adapting classic films for the stage, here he has taken on this much-loved novel which follows the lives of four college friends in New York City: aspiring actor Willem (Bridgerton star, Luke Thompson), architect Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), artist JB (Omari Douglas), and lawyer Jude (James Norton). This metrosexual quartet are all successful in their own right but seem locked in the orbit of the vulnerable, wounded, Jude, who has a mysterious past.
The trials and tribulation of yuppies suffering in comfort in Manhattan are eternally fascinating to many, and Yanagihara's day job, as editor and chief of the New York Times style and design magazine gives her a unique insight into this tribe. On the surface it screams 'aspiration' but don't be fooled, this takes a distinctly dark turn.
Straight out of his phenomenal success in ITV's Happy Valley James Norton has taken on something here which is quite extraordinary. Never off stage for its 3 hours 40 minutes running time, I can't think of an actor who has put himself through such physical and mental privations for a role. Repeating it eight times a week for a long run is quite a feat. The pedigree of the piece and its huge appeal to thirtysomethings has meant that this already sell-out run had to add another month at another theater – the Savoy.
In a program note Yanagihara generously warns that love it or hate it you won't easily forget it. She's right, but sadly I fall into the latter category.
It resembles nothing less than a Passion Play and van Hove often has the naked, scourged body of Norton borne aloft and held as if it's the Pietá, but at least the function there was to inspire some faith, here it merely presents all the pain as spectacle, to serve an ultimately rather mawkish tale.
There's a fine line between representing self-harm and voyeuristically exploiting it and when Jude slowly cuts himself with a razor for the fourth time and he constantly wears a blood stained shirt we do wonder if it has been crossed. He also walks with a limp, suffers agonizing leg and back pain and when he removes his shirt we see his back is covered in welts. Effectively abandoned as a child and raised in the 'care system' it turns out (spoiler alert) that he has been the victim of horrendous and apparently unending abuse, which continued from childhood into his teenage years. First raped by a religious Brother in a care home who pimped him as a prostitute, then imprisoned in a cell by an evil Doctor who used him as a sex slave, then raped by an alpha male partner, Caleb. For a piece that presents itself as naturalistic, what underpins this Pageant of Pain is however very flimsy. The circumstances of the pimping and imprisonment for example are glossed over and instead of explaining the why and the how, we are left with the perpetrators (all played with impressive menace by Elliot Cowan) as simply Pure Evil, as if in a cheap horror flick. They have no context. Likewise, Jude himself is never given any agency, he's merely a vessel for this unending catalog of depravity. It also begs the question whether someone that damaged would even make it to this privileged Manhattan nirvana that he now inhabits.
What's odd is that the central thread of the piece is about how strong his support network is. Apart from flatmate (and later lover) Willem there are Harold (Zubin Varla) his Svengali/law professor who even adopts him as his own son and Andy (Emilio Doorgasingh), a seemingly multi-disciplinary medic who also appears to be on a permanent exclusive 24 hour call out for Jude. All bemoan their passivity in the face of Jude's suffering. Norton's muscular virility too doesn't help in presenting a character who is, certainly by the end, meant to be a wraith, utterly physically wasted from self-abuse.
Despite the efforts of this very impressive cast, we never really get under the characters' skins. All are moons orbiting Jude, and Jude is a blank page on which the writer has projected 'Vulnerability' writ large. Norton, an incredibly sensitive and nuanced actor and a genuine star, gives it everything but after 3 hours it loses purchase on the audience's attention then slides into melodrama. The love-conquers-all ending owes more to Dawson's Creek than European art house.
Jan Versweyveld's simple set is framed on each side with great video projections of New York streets and a string quartet in the stalls provides a filmic underscoring. An D'Huys costumes are trendy casual perfection. The action plays out on a thin traverse stage with audience, who get immersed in the gore, seated at the rear. Anyone who might have been personally affected by the themes of self-harm or abuse shown here would be wise to steer clear.
