We shuttle between Jude’s present, beginning at the age of 28 when he has become a brilliant lawyer in New York, and his monstrous past, which continues to stalk him. There is plenty of spurting blood, as per the headlines, but it has a ruthless integrity to it: the production is asking us to consider the effects of abuse, across a lifetime, with all its horrifying repetition. He escapes at 15 only to fall into the clutches of a sadistic doctor (also Cowan, even more chilling). The story follows Jude, an orphaned child who, taken in by monastic Christians, is groomed by Brother Luke (Elliot Cowan, chilling) and violently raped by paedophiles over several years. The consensual sex, when it comes, does not seem gratuitous. Where Yanagihara faced some charges of appropriation in her depiction of male friendship and gay desire, that criticism cannot be applied to this adaptation by Koen Tachelet, Van Hove and Yanagihara. The nudity is hardly shocking in the mix of it all, and comes so often that we feel inured to the sight of men – mostly Norton – slipping out of their trousers.
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