'The Line of Beauty' review — Alan Hollinghurst's literary epic comes to the stage tingling with ache and allure

Read our review of The Line of Beauty, directed by Michael Grandage, now in performances at the Almeida Theatre to 29 November.

Summary

• Jack Holden adapts Alan Hollinghurst's award-winning novel for the stage
• The 1980s-set story follows Nick Guest as he navigates a privileged world
• Jasper Talbot stars as Nick and Charles Edwards as Tory MP Gerald
• Michael Grandage directs an artful and elegant production

To capture the soul of a novel on stage is quite an art, especially when the source is as rich and luminous as Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty. The coming-of-age story, centred on Oxford graduate Nick Guest and steeped in class divisions, politics, and hedonistic excess, is a vivid panorama of the 1980s. Jack Holden’s adaptation may only present a distilled overview of Hollinghurst’s literary epic, but the scenes he pulls out and lays on the stage still tingle with ache and allure.

Most of that comes from a perfectly paced and often downright beautiful production by Michael Grandage. While there’s no theatrical pizzazz, the story unfolds like a hallucinatory fever dream. At its centre is Jasper Talbot’s boyish Nick, who begins as a squeaky-clean innocent and grows up before our eyes. He’s welcomed into the home of the Fedden family as their lodger, but he exists on the fringes, never quite settling into the skin of the blue-blooded elite. When we meet them in 1983, Margaret Thatcher has just been re-elected, and Toby’s father, Gerald (a stiff-upper-lipped Charles Edwards), is riding the wave of success as a Tory MP.

Their house has all the glamour and darkness of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, and Nick is beguiled by it. At first, he refuses to talk politics, insisting that his interests lie in the nature of beauty and the works of Henry James. But as he’s pulled further into the web of wealth and status, Nick makes a telling decision: to leave behind his good-natured boyfriend Leo, a Black local councillor from a working-class background, in favour of a world defined by individualism. It unfolds like a tragedy in slow motion.

This is a cast of great talent, with a stellar performance from Ellie Bamber as the Feddens’ troubled daughter Cat. As she soars through an endless stream of boyfriends while her parents exist in a constant, lavish social whirl, it becomes clear that Cat longs for real, emotional connection. Her reliance on Nick gives the play a crucial beating heart.

And yet, a flaw of Holden’s adaptation is that we never quite see the inner life of Nick’s romances. While Grandage gifts us with an exquisite scene of Nick dining with Leo and his devoutly Christian mother and sister (a brilliantly observant Francesca Amewudah-Rivers), and plenty of hurried, hidden sex scenes, the roots of their relationship never flower into full emotional depth. With Wani (Arty Froushan), the drug-fuelled son of a Lebanese billionaire, their interactions remain a dance of power right up until the final moment.

Still, fans of the novel will be more than impressed with this artful, intricate retelling of Hollinghurst’s masterpiece. It might not have all the trimmings, but its essence is fully preserved.

The Line of Beauty is at the Almeida Theatre to 29 November.

Photo credit: The Line of Beauty (Photos by Johan Persson)