There are no wild directorial flourishes or big awards-bait performances in director Michael Grandage and playwright Jack Holden’s stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s seminal novel of the ‘80s. The wheel is at no point reinvented.
But, by Thatcher’s ghost, it does a tremendous job of cutting Hollinghurst’s period odyssey into a gripping, flab-free two-and-a-half hours of theatre. It is, above all, a great piece of storytelling.
If you’re not familiar, The Line of Beauty concerns Nick Guest (here played by Jasper Talbot), a young gay man who in 1983 moves into the ultra fancy home of his uni mate Toby Fedden’s parents as a lodger. ‘Welcome to Kensington Park Garden,’ intones Nick’s mother Rachel (Claudia Harrison), as she introduces Nick to the house she shares with her newly elected Tory MP husband Gerald (Charles Edward) and depressive daughter Catherine.
The story charts his journey through the decade: adjacent to the ruling classes but not a member of them, he is further removed from the mainstream by his sexuality, which he is entirely open about, but also othered by. A relationship with Leo (Alistair Nwachukwu), a Black councillor (one assumes for Labour) is largely conducted on the down-low. Though nominally invited in, Nick is wary of bringing Leo into the circle of the Feddens for a multitude of reasons. Some are clearly self-interested: the pointedly ‘apolitical” Nick is aware Leo is unlikely to get on with his Tory benefactors. Others are more self-preservational: this is the ‘80s, where the AIDS crisis is reaching its zenith and homophobia remains mainstream. Section 28 is never directly referenced, but why bother when you have ‘Badger’ (Robert Portal)? Gerald’s shady vulture capitalist BFF, he barely tolerates Nick and spews hateful bile at him the second he’s given an opening to do so.
The BBC TV adaptation from 2006 really laid on the ‘80s period porn, but it’s a definite strength of Grandage’s production that it eschews this in the name of clarity. Christopher Oram’s set is minimalist, with the Almeida’s rough stone wall proudly on display, juxtaposed with a slick, shiny floor. Furniture, props, and above all people flit nimbly across the stage, but it never bogs down in details. Of course it’s still the ’80s, just not fetishistically so. Queer electro pop of the day burbles in the background – often, ironically, at big Tory happenings – the AIDs epidemic becomes an ever darker plot driver, and Maggie Thatcher even has a memorable cameo. But the tone is never really ‘the ’80s, eh?’. At a ball at which the female characters don an array of genuinely insane looking cocktail dresses you’re jolted back into remembering what an aesthetic nuthouse the decade was at times.
Keeping things on a more sober keel allows Grandage and Holden to surface on the more philosophical side of the text, the questions it asks about privilege, beauty, queerness and whether beauty itself is a privilege or something purer.
Nick is an unusual role. Talbot plays him as an almost Candide-like innocent; a wide-eyed young man who starts the story off squeaky clean save for the semi-illicit way he pursues his sexuality. But is that who he really is? Flashes of rage punctuate an affable facade that begins to buckle under a narcotic influence later on. But he remains fundamentally good natured. Is he? We’re never quite sure, and he’s accused late on - by members of an upper class he never truly comprehends - of concealing who he really is. But isn’t that their fault?
Talbot is a likeable focal point to the story. But I wonder if he’s a bit too convincing as a man determined to never let on what’s happening inside - there’s something a little too slick and frictionless about his performance to really wow dramatically. Likewise I’d be happy to see Michael Grandage making his presence as a director felt more blatantly. It’s great storytelling - a fine, sensitive articulation of a novel - but I could have definitely handled it being a bit more aggressively theatrical.
If it failed to transfer to the West End it would be Grandage’s first show in well over a decade not to do so. Given it had sold its entire Almeida run out in advance, you have to think it will in fact go to Theatreland, where it would stand as a smart, sympathetic take on a somewhat daring choice of novel for commercial theatre. At the edgier Almeida it feels exquisite, but MOR.
