NHB Modern Plays-A Little Life

A bruising and beautiful story of love, the limits of human endurance, and the tyranny of memory, adapted for the stage from Hanya Yanagihara's bestselling novel.

'I promise you more patience, more gratitude. I promise you less vanity, less selfishness, less complaining, less fear. I promise you. You just have to survive.'

A Little Life follows the complex relationships of four college friends in New York City: Willem, an actor; Malcolm, an architect; JB, an artist; and, at the centre of their group, Jude, a lawyer.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, changed by ambition, addiction and pride. Yet their greatest challenge is Jude himself, whose secrets – and shame – define not just his own life, but that of his friends as well.

A bruising and beautiful story of love, the limits of human endurance, and the tyranny of memory, Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life has sold over a million copies and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction.

The stage adaptation – conceived by Ivo van Hove, and adapted by Koen Tachelet, van Hove and Yanagihara herself – was first performed in a Dutch-language production at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 2018, before transferring to New York in 2022. This English-language version opened in London's West End in 2023, directed by Ivo van Hove and with a cast led by James Norton as Jude.