Theatre review Power, politics and hedonism abound in robust adaptation of shimmering novel

How to adapt a novel as big and shimmering as Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 Booker prize winner?

-  Arifa Akbar

The Line of Beauty Almeida theatre, London

A story that captured not just the hypocrisies of one elite, Thatcher-loving family but a whole era, with power and politics bristling beside the hedonistic explosion of 1980s gay culture.

Maybe it needs an entire series (as in the case of Andrew Davies' BBC Two drama), but Jack Holden, whose 2021 Olivier-nominated show, Cruise, traversed similar ground, makes a robust go of it here. He arrives at the dark heart of the book while filleting and mixing the order of things so that the timeline of the central three sections is shorter and slicker but also less intensely lived.

The focal point is the rulingclass Fedden family, whose bumptious patriarch, Gerald (Charles Edwards), is a newly elected Conservative MP and in whose Kensington Park Gardens household the middle-class, timidly gay Oxford graduate, Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot), becomes, well, a guest.

He is also the observing insider/ outsider of this entitled milieu.