The Telegraph 10 marzo 2023

‘As a culture, we’re scared of the penis’: Happy Valley’s James Norton on baring all in A Little Life

As Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘trauma porn’ novel hits the stage, cast members Norton, Omari Douglas, Luke Thompson and Zach Wyatt get set to shock

By Chris Harvey
10 March 2023

'None of it is gratuitous': James Norton in rehearsals for A Little Life

If ever a play called for trigger warnings, it’s the adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Nudity, violence, sexual and emotional abuse, self-harm... you name it, it’s there between the covers of the American author’s 720-page Booker-shortlisted novel. Ever since it was published in 2015, the book has been dividing readers between those who consider it a masterpiece and those who believe it takes the suffering of its central character to the level of “trauma porn”. Now, the great Belgian stage director Ivo van Hove has reinvented it as theatre – originally in Dutch, now for the first time in English – and London audiences are about to feel its full force.

A Little Life is the story of four male friends who share an intense closeness that is centred around the quiet, beautiful Jude. He is suffering from excruciating pain in his legs that he does not explain. As Jude, van Hove has cast James Norton, the 37-year-old star of Grantchester, McMafia and War and Peace, who arrives trailing clouds of glory from the recent fiery finale of Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley on BBC One. Norton is ready for whatever van Hove’s production throws at him, including its naked sex scenes – but are we?

“There’s still a block when it comes to male nudity, about the penis, and what it looks like, and its size and its shape – and all these things of which we as a culture are still very wary,” says Norton. “We’re scared of the penis. Men, I think, we’re far more obsessed with it. I mean, women I’ve asked are like, ‘I don’t care, you know, it’s just a penis, whatever’.”

Around Norton, van Hove has assembled a cast of experienced stage actors who have also been in some of the biggest shows on television. Luke Thompson, 34, is best known as Benedict, the artistic spare-to-the-heir in the hit Regency romance Bridgerton. Omari Douglas, 28, delivered one of the all-time-great exit lines in Russell T Davies’s Aids drama It’s a Sin, as his character escaped his family’s plans to pack him off to Nigeria to “cure” him of his homosexuality – “And if you need to forward any mail, I’ll be staying at 23 P--- Off Avenue, London W F---.” Zach Wyatt, 25, plays the warrior mage Syndril in the prequel to Netflix’s fantasy drama The Witcher: Blood Origin.

On the day I catch up with the actors, Norton is the last to appear. I bump into Douglas walking up to the rehearsal studio; Wyatt has just woken up – he came into the studio’s kitchen to meditate then fell asleep on the sofa; Thompson arrives and starts washing up dirty mugs. All three happily squash themselves onto the sofa together before Norton emerges from rehearsals and plonks himself in an armchair beside them.

Four play: from left, Zach Wyatt, James Norton, Omari Douglas and Luke Thompson star in A Little Life
CREDIT: Charlie Gray

The actors are fully aware that van Hove’s willingness to confront the most extreme parts of Yanagihara’s book may provoke strong reactions. A review of the Dutch-language staging in New York noted that a third of the audience did not return after the interval. How would the London cast feel if they began to notice empty seats during a performance? “It’s gonna happen,” says Douglas. “I think we’d be naive to be annoyed by something like that. If you make that personal choice to come and sit with this material, you also have the right to get up and go… It’s reflecting the darkest corners of humanity.”

Norton would only ask that if people do leave early, they relinquish their right to judge the play as a whole. In New York, he says, “I did hear stories of people buying tickets and publicly walking out before any of the darkness happened, just as an act of protest because they find the book so objection­able.” New York, he notes, is “a more divided, opinionated city, but to protest against a piece of art which you don’t like at the expense of other people’s enjoyment and the performers? Don’t do that.”

Are the actors concerned that playing such demanding material for nearly four hours every night over a long run will take its toll on them, too? Thompson – who plays Willem, Jude’s closest friend and protector – insists that “even when you’re doing the most dark or difficult play, you can always find lightness and joy in it”.

“Our rehearsal room is a really light, fun place,” adds Norton. “Horror-movie sets are often the most fun because you’re trying to offset the dark. Sometimes in our industry there’s a sort of sacred thing attributed to the Method: that Daniel Day-Lewis thing where people assume that in order to do a good performance you need to carry [the darkness home] with you. I sense that the four of us are from the school of: let’s draw a line. Do good work, but at the point at which it infringes upon your life, and your friendships and relationships – so that you can’t go home and you can’t sleep and you can’t function in society – stop.”

James Norton and Omari Douglas in rehearsal
CREDIT: Jan Versweyveld

Although Norton has appeared naked “very briefly” on stage before, he says the level of nudity in A Little Life is “new for me, and massively exposing”. What makes it harder right now “is that we’re rehearsing, so you’re in a very light room – it’s like being in your workplace and just getting naked, which is very weird. In the theatre, even though there’s going to be a hundred times more people, it will be much easier, with the lights [down] and the atmosphere, it will just make sense. Whereas now, because you’re stopping and starting, it feels more exposing.
“But in general, it’s a bit like the violence in this piece and the self-harm: none of it is gratuitous – the nudity is so justified and so necessary in order to find the ultimate shame this man is put through. Without it, the story and the piece would suffer; none of it is gratuitous. And I feel it. We did one of the scenes recently and, my god, it’s shaming, you know, I lie on the floor naked being kicked and spat on – and it doesn’t get much more degrading than that. I’m there, there’s no journey I have to go on. It’s really embarrassing and horrible.”

Thompson, who also has experience of stage nudity – “But nothing like this!” – insists that sex scenes “can be really rich, condensed moments... a lot of the juice of a relationship is in those moments”.
He identifies one of the more graphic sex scenes in A Little Life, between Jude and Willem, as “a synthesis of their relationship and the whole crux, the whole problem with it. That’s why it’s so important to see it. And I think it would be a bit polite, a bit awkward and maybe quite British to say, ‘Oh, we don’t have to see that, we get the idea’. But I think part of the journey of the book is like, ‘No, we’re going to sit with this. And not apologise for it’.”

Luke Thompson and James Norton in rehearsal
CREDIT: Jan Versweyveld

We talk about Yanagihara’s recent insistence, in a discussion about whether a woman is entitled to write about specifically male experiences, including those of gay men, that “I have the right to write about whatever I want”. Does that hold true for all writers? “Well, inherently they can,” says Douglas, who plays the painter J B, the only openly queer man in the group. “I don’t think that should be taken away from anyone in any sense...
In terms of the bigger conversation about who has ownership over what kinds of stories, it’s so nuanced. I don’t think it’s a matter of people not being allowed to write their stories. I think the problem is that very often you don’t get to see those stories being told by the people who go through that experience. It’s just an imbalance.”

In the case of A Little Life, Norton adds, “as a man, I feel f------ seen”. Douglas agrees: “It’s about men grappling with the full spectrum of their emotions, their masculinity, their affections.” The men in the play, says Wyatt, “are allowed to be emotional and delicate and fragile. All of those things that I think you brush over with this stereotype of what a man is supposed to be.”

Wyatt – who plays Malcolm, the architect son of a wealthy banker – was born in Hertfordshire but has American and Canadian roots, with an accent to match. That, say the others, makes him a useful resource in correcting them if their own accents slip. This leads into a discussion of the recent row about Emma Corrin’s more-than-two-year-old remark about wanting to leave behind the role of Princess Diana in The Crown to appear in something gritty with “an outrageous accent”. In the aftermath of that row, Norton found himself named in a list of posh actors who had taken roles outside their “lived experience” for his portrayal of murderer Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley. “I grew up in Yorkshire, and I had a Yorkshire accent. I just happened to lose it when I was 13,” he protests. “But this country is obsessed with class.”

'We're always up against budget': Norton as Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley
CREDIT: Matt Squire/BBC

Norton, by the way, would like to put to bed one misconception about that Happy Valley finale. The filmmakers did not shoot multiple endings, as some people have suggested. “It’s nonsense,” he says. “Everyone’s assuming that the BBC is pumping millions of pounds into filming alternative endings just to keep it secret and to procrastinate, which would be absurd, considering we’re always up against the clock, we’re always up against budget. No one has time to do that. Sally wrote one ending. It changed over the course of development. One thing which is true is that for a long time only Sarah [Lancashire] and I had that ending, we were the only ones given the script. And I know that a lot of the other cast never actually knew how it ended.”

As for who should be allowed to play which roles, Norton admits that there is a conversation among actors about it, in which one common viewpoint is that “You go, ‘I want to transform, I don’t want to play versions of myself over and over again’. If we are talking about [putting on] an accent as a line which we need to draw, then it does start to feel constrictive. But it’s a very complicated conversation.”

Wyatt suggests that “the awareness is growing of what heritage might mean to someone or what a real life experience might mean to someone in that situation, and an awareness of perhaps the years in which it hasn’t been the case, minstrelling and all these things... that maybe there’s a person that knows a little bit more about it than I do, or can at least offer a different perspective”.

“This is an industry that has been ‘gate-kept’ by a type of person with a specific point of view,” says Douglas, who by playing a gay man in It’s a Sin was fulfilling Russell T Davies’s stated intention to cast only queer actors in the main roles. “This ‘awareness’ has come from minorities, whether that be [related to] heritage, ethnicity, sexuality, disability. When those people see their own stories, they absolutely have the right to say: ‘I believe in authenticity.’ ”

Norton compares it to when women first began to take on female theatre roles in the 17th century. “It’s like the guy at the Globe who’s saying, ‘Wait, I was always playing the female part. And now women are playing it’. And getting upset by that, as opposed to thinking ‘I get to play opposite a woman. And that’s great’.”

Omari Douglas in rehearsal
CREDIT: Jan Versweyveld

But does the boundary line keep expanding ever outwards? “I think it is moving and expanding,” says Norton, noting the RSC’s decision to cast a disabled actor, Arthur Hughes, in the title role of Richard III last year, after which the out­going artistic director Gregory Doran suggested that only disabled actors should take the role in future, comparing it to how white actors would no longer think of Othello as a part for them.

“Maybe the line will never stop shifting,” says Thompson, “because, historically, there’s always been anxiety and question and debate about what can and should be represented. The whole point of theatre has always been a little bit like: there’s a provocation, what do we think about it? Since the Greeks, it’s been: what do we think about this thing? What do we think about a guy sacrificing a child to win a war?”

A Little Life is sure to be seen by some as a provocation. But the closeness it has already forged among its cast is tangible. “As far as our relationships go,” Norton says, “I said this to my partner [the actress Imogen Poots] because we met on a play, five years ago, and now we’re engaged. And we often remember that first moment because it was a two-hander, and I said to her on the first day, I think over coffee, ‘We’re gonna go deep’, as a straight metaphor, ‘we’re going to have to go somewhere together’. And then we end up getting married!

“But I said that to you guys, as well,” he says, turning to the others. “The amount of trust… you just go through something.” Will the bonds they’ve forged last as long as the friendships in the book? “We’ll see each other in our 70s,” Norton begins, “and we will look each other in the eye and go…” They look at each other and laugh.

A Little Life runs at Richmond Theatre, London TW9, Tues–Mar 18; at Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1, Mar 25–Jun 18; then at Savoy Theatre, London WC2, from July 4–Aug 5.