For years, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove avoided reading Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling contemporary epic A Little Life (2015). Many of his colleagues were avid fans of the decades-spanning tale of male friendship and bodily trauma, but Van Hove—known for sleek, spare stage adaptations of The Damned, A View from the Bridge, and Network—had mentally filed the book, with its now iconic Peter Hujar cover, under “another gay coming-of-age story.” Eventually, he read and loved the book, and in 2018 adapted it into a play for the International Theater Amsterdam. The production made its New York debut, in Dutch with subtitles, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last fall. Now, it makes its English-language debut at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre. Omari Douglas and James Norton star. —Osman Can Yerebakan