ALMEIDA THEATRE – UNTIL 29th NOVEMBER 2025
REVIEWED BY JACKIE THORNTON
4****
1980s Thatcher Britain is the backdrop for Jack Holden’s hugely entertaining and moving adaptation of Allan Hollinghursts 2004 Man Booker Prize-winning novel. With a nostalgic soundtrack featuring Frankie Goes To Hollywood and The Communards, we’re catapulted back into an upper-class world where image and money are everything.
It’s here Oxford graduate and Henry James scholar Nick Guest, born to a middle-class family, finds himself dazzled by beauty and opulence. With an uninhibited performance from new talent Jasper Talbot, Nick is an unabashed aesthete drawn to the curves of furniture, the majesty of architecture and, of course, the exquisiteness of the male form. Thanks to uni friend Toby Fedden (charmingly portrayed by Leo Suter), an Adonis blissfully unaware of his affect on him, Nick ends up lodging with the uber Conservative Feddens in West Kensington, and treated like one of their own by newly elected Tory MP Gerald Fedden (a wonderfully comic performance from Charles Edward) his wife Rachel (astutely depicted by Claudia Harrison) and their daughter Cat, whose Bipolar disorder is sensitively captured by Ellie Bamber.
It’s all champagne cocktails and summers in France until the consequences of unfettered hedonism come home to roost. Loosely disguised homophobia rears its ugly head when power and status are threatened and the jolly fascination with and worshipping of Thatcher suddenly feels deadly.
Christopher Oram’s set and costume design tastefully captures the 1980s with the frumpier outfits left to the women while the male fashion feels more timeless. Amongst Nick’s lovers is Leo Charles, a Black council worker with a hyper religious mother, adeptly played by Alistair Nwachukwu. His more humble presence provides contrast and allows Michael Grandage’s intelligent satire of the wealthy more weight. Nick’s meeting with Leo’s mother (Doreene Blackstock in fine form) and sister Rosemary (a highly perceptive performance from Francesca Amewudah-Rivers) is a standout scene, thoughtfully commenting on the roots of prejudice and seamlessly bringing together core themes of how art can transcend and divide classes.
The Line of Beauty also reflects on a terrifying time when HIV/AIDS killed so many gay men and a lack of understanding in society stoked homophobia. It’s delicately handled and a number of poignant moments hit home hard. All in all, a masterly balance of laugh-out-loud searing satire and bitter tragedy.