THE QUACK

“Guess what? I got us tickets to a play with James Norton in!” Mum said, very excitedly over the phone. James Norton sits highly on Mum’s celebrity crush list, along with Oliver Reed, Robert Redford, and the guy from Gogglebox. This was a big deal. 

The play was called A Little Life. It is based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel. Neither of us had read this novel, so were not aware of the story. As far as I was concerned it was going to be a splendid Sunday afternoon play where James Norton notoriously gets naked. A British Magic Mike as it were.

We received an email a few days before the show, telling us they were going to put stickers over our phones to stop up from taking pictures of Norton’s willy (not in those words). And a warning that the play includes sexual abuse, self-harm, suicide. It was also 3 hours and 40 minutes long. Not so Magic Mike then. 

“Will you cope?” Mum asked.

“Mum…” I rolled my eyes. 

“Sorry, I have to ask. James gets fully naked apparently.”

“Yes. You said.”

“Yes. Well, I’m off to the garden centre.”

So, Sunday arrived, and we go to the Harold Pinter Theatre. Our seats K11 and K12 were in the middle of the row, in the middle of the stalls. 

The play started off nice enough, four blokes celebrating a 30^th birthday in a Manhattan flat. It was not too dissimilar to a scene you would watch in Friends. Then things started to not be so ‘Friends’. It began when James’s character was questioned, “What happened to your leg Jude? You’ve never told us what happened to your leg!” And from there things spiralled into a violin-squeaking darkness.

 For context (and what we discovered too late), the story is about an orphaned man named Jude who is haunted by his traumatic childhood in which he endured sexual abuse. Consequently, as an adult, he struggles with his mental health, relationships, and resorts to self-harm regularly. 

So the thing is, I’m quite squeamish. On occasion, this squeamishness has caused me to faint. The last time was when I was getting my highlights done…one minute the hair colourist and I were talking about Sticky Vicky in Benidorm, the next I woke up in the chair surrounded by the customers, with foils in my hair, and blue lights flashing outside.

Another time was at film school when they showed us an artsy film of a woman giving birth. I had to sit outside on a chair for the rest of the class. Another, was in the cinema watching Black Swan. 

So, when Mum asked, will you cope? she had a valid reason. 

Back to the play, the first self-harm scene came, and I thought I had escaped the curse. Then I began to hear a familiar fizzing, and felt a heat overtaking my body. 

No, no, no, I thought, not in front of James Norton. I tapped my leg violently and scrunched my toes. I imagined myself on a Caribbean beach, I drank my water…. you can’t faint in front of James Norton, you can’t faint in front of James Norton…. James Norton faded to black. 

When I woke up, my head was on Mum’s shoulder and my face was drenched with cold sweat.

“Shall we go?” Mum whispered as soon as she saw I was alive again.  I shook my head. I’m British after all, there was no way I was going to make the whole K row stand in the middle of the play. Keep calm and carry on, and all that.

We sat there for another 40 minutes and watched how things got worse for Jude. By the time he was fully naked, it was far from a splendid Sunday afternoon. The lights came on for the interval.  Mum smiled through her heartbreak and said, “We should go.” 

We wandered down Regents Street, where Mum healed her disappointment with a pair of new sandals from Russell & Bromley. She then told me, whilst walking in her new shoes, that at one point when I was unconscious, she thought I may have died and so kept her fingers on my pulse for safe measure. “It went really, really fast and then dropped really, really slow,” she explained as she checked out the Reiss mannequin in the window.

“At least I didn’t make a noise,” I replied, trying to find some sort of silver lining. Mum pulled an awkward face.  I panicked. “What? what?”

“Don’t worry the actors are trained to act over these things.” 

“What sound!?” 

 “It was kind of like…”  She then made the grunting noise of the girl from The Exorcist. 

Mortified.

You’ll be pleased to know that Mum bought two more tickets, so she can see the second half, and finally find out what happened to Jude’s legs – and see her crush once more. She kindly (and sort of reluctantly), invited me again, but I declined. 

I’ll leave her and James to it. 

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