Writer: Jack Holden
Director: Michael Grandage
Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel is a thickly layered examination of politics, queer life, art, literature, race and AIDS. It must have been tricky for Jack Holden to adapt the book into a modern-day drawing-room play. And even though many of Hollinghurst’s ideas are omitted, Holden succeeds by presenting the novel, first as a comedy of manners and then as a damning indictment of Thatcherite neo-liberalism and class privilege.
AIDS always haunts the work of Hollinghurst. In his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, set in the very early days of the epidemic, the male characters all seem to be wearing the same aftershave, Trouble for Men, a hint of the horrors to come. The Folding Star deals with grief and loss as its hero, Edward Manners, tries to track down the beautiful Luc in Belgium. The virus is hardly mentioned in his latest work, Our Evenings, strangely missing from the Booker shortlist this year, but at a school reunion, the old boys discuss one of their contemporaries who died of AIDS.
However, there’s no escaping the virus in The Line of Beauty as it’s set firmly in the 1980s, and perhaps that is why Holden, the author and performer of Cruise, a play that slips between today and the decade of AIDS, was drawn to adapt the novel. Soho was at the centre of Cruise, but The Line of Beauty is mainly set in Kensington amongst the very rich.
Nick Guest arrives at the Feddens’ house to become their new lodger. He’s rich in a very upper-middle-class way, Oxford-educated and privileged, but these aspects are diminished in a household where the patriarch, Gerald, has just become a Tory MP. Nick is there as a university friend of the Fedden’s son, Toby, a dim Hooray Henry kind of man whose muscles, rather than mind, attract Nick. Daughter Catherine has issues. She’s on lithium and self-harms. Parents Gerald and Rachel ask their new lodger to keep an eye on her when they are abroad – Cat-sitting, they call it. It’s a duty that Nick takes on gladly; her forthrightness makes her the only decent member of the Fedden family.
Meanwhile, outside of the house in Kensington Park Gardens, Nick embarks on a relationship with Camden Council worker Leo, played with a swaggering vulnerability by Alistair Nwachukwu. Nick shows Catherine (Ellie Bamber, soon to be seen playing Kate Moss in the film Moss and Freud alongside Derek Jacobi) a photo of Leo. She instantly proclaims that the relationship won’t work; Nick and Leo belong in different circles. Has she somehow seen in the photograph Leo’s working-class status, or is she referring to the colour of his skin?
But Catherine proves to be correct when Nick is lured away from Leo by beauty, beauty for its own sake. He takes up with the oily Wani (a suitably oleaginous turn by Arty Froushan), who wants to set up a magazine dedicated to aesthetics. Nick’s path follows a line to beauty, and to the lines of cocaine that Wani is always cutting, even when the Prime Minister herself is in the room next door. Their glossy magazine is called Ogee, after Hogarth’s S-shaped line of beauty. A neon tube depicting such a shape is lowered down above the stage when Nick and Wani are in their office.
Jasper Talbot (so tremendous in the National’s Inter Alia earlier this year) is excellent as Nick Guest, who becomes as vacuous as the Feddens themselves. And yet, as his name implies, he is a guest in their world of politics and laissez-faire businesses. His sexuality, his class status, even perversely his love of art, set him apart.
Director Michael Grandage’s stylish production is complemented by the striking costumes by Christopher Oram: complicated jumpers for Catherine, short shorts for Gerald (Charles Edwards) when on holiday in France, a spaghetti vest for Leo, and, at the end, a pair of gaudy buckle loafers for Nick. If the clothes don’t exactly scream the 80s, the music choices (Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Communards) help locate the play in the decade of excess, as Thatcher’s deregulation of the Stock Exchange allows the rich to become ever richer.
Nick finds out the hard way that money can’t buy beauty, and that, instead, it can be found in simple pleasures, like when the sunlight hits London streets, captured eventually by Howard Hudson’s bleached lights as the 80s come to an end.
Runs until 29 November 2025
