A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is set in a New York apartment shared by four mega-successful yuppies: an architect, a fine artist, a film star and a Wall Street attorney, Jude, played by James Norton. A friendly doctor tags along occasionally and an older lawyer, in his sixties, joins the gang after legally adopting Jude.

None of the men has a partner or a family, and they never discuss things like sport, cars, investments, movies or girls. Instead they hug a lot and cook pastries for each other in a kitchenette on stage. The play feels like a joke-free episode of Friends with an all-male cast. And the script might have been written by a teenage girl. The characters say things like, ‘I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you’, ‘Does it bother you that I still hang out with him?’, ‘I forgot to get you a birthday present’ and ‘I love you.’

After an hour of spineless chitchat, the play moves into a sad phase. Jude, we learn, is an orphan who was raised in a monastery by paedophile friars who liked to thrash him unconscious with metal belt straps. After one particularly gruesome rape, he rushes into the garden and decapitates Brother Luke’s daffodils, one by one. After graduating from the friary, Jude uses his sexual skills to become a rent boy. One of his clients smashes a bottle of Prosecco over his skull, as if launching a battleship, and rapes him on a hospital bed. Poor Jude. He deals with the trauma by cutting his forearms and refusing to eat. Like a teenage girl.

Norton has to spend most of the play staggering around the stage in a shirt soaked with blood because the scars left by the brutal friars keep reopening and weeping. And he’s forever slashing his wrists and spilling claret everywhere. The surfeit of gore is enervating and boring, not moving. And this show gets through enough pig’s blood to make a couple of pounds of black pudding. Ivo van Hove’s fidgety, amateurish direction spoils the dramatic focus with a soundtrack of scraping violins and an array of video screens that show clips of moving traffic. The clips go all blurry whenever Jude has a meltdown.

At the end of the first half, which lasts nearly two hours, Jude commits suicide. Phew. What a relief. But after the interval, a terrible shock. Jude has survived. And the show sets off on a second lap of angst and self-pity. More crying, yelling, beating and bleeding. More raping, hugging, cooking and eating. Jude’s film-star friend, Willem, breaks cover and tries to seduce him, but oh dear, Jude isn’t ready for a physical romance yet. Never mind, says Willem, he doesn’t want to rush things either. He claims he can easily go for long periods without sex. Come off it. These are rich, handsome, gay New Yorkers in their forties. Why are they acting like novices at a nunnery?

As for the infamous striptease scene, here’s what happened. Once James Norton had whipped off his clothes I glanced over at the nearest usherette, whose eyes were fixed on her shoes. Not interested. Sitting through this epic bore is like a trip to A&E. As the hours pass, and nothing happens, you become aware of new and unimagined reserves of stoicism within your soul. Truly, a spiritual experience. But not in a good way.

Eugene O’Hare’s new play opens with a dilemma. Chrissy, aged 50, usually has vodka for breakfast but today her sister is serving her beer on condition that Chrissy enters rehab to cure her addiction. Will Chrissy agree or not? Chrissy’s drink problem was triggered by the death of her daughter, Heather, whose car smashed into a wall on the same day she passed her driving test. Chrissy keeps Heather’s bedroom in pristine condition but she confesses that she once drank a bottle of her dead daughter’s perfume during an alcohol shortage. And she craves personal defilement by offering sex to casual strangers whom she meets on a towpath by the canal.

The play moves slowly, repetitively even, and it’s far from pretty to watch. Chrissy’s home is a cobwebbed dump with vomit-stained clothing scattered across the sticky floorboards. Moaning constantly at her sister, she squats in a ruined armchair wearing a nylon bedrobe that features a grey damp patch shaped like Tasmania. The atmosphere is relentlessly dour and lowering but O’Hare’s psychological acuity is impressive and his plot is beautifully organised. A multilayered drama emerges from a single incident, a suspicious car crash, which spins a malign and complex web around the lives of Chrissy and her extended family. Without the car crash, the drama vanishes. That’s the way to tell a story.