The Line of Beauty, Almeida review: A wild, witty ride through Thatcher-era high society

Director Michael Grandage and writer Jack Holden’s pacy adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s classic gay novel has the dizzying fizz of a champagne-drenched cocktail party. Painted faces flicker in and out of view. Conversations fizz with bluster and tension. Painful truths land messily before being neatly whisked away, like a dropped canapé swept up by deft waiters. We’re in the posturing, thrusting world of the 1980s political elite here. Power corrupts, and this story’s beauty-obsessed protagonist is absolutely in thrall to the suited scoundrels who’re running (and ruining) the country.

It’s pretty different in feel to Hollinghurst’s book, which has an artfully disjointed structure, one that echoes the calculated silences that its enigmatic narrator Nick must use to survive as a gay aesthete in this homophobic world. Holden’s adaptation fills in those gaps, glossing over the novel’s abrupt leaps through time, and replacing its emotional lacunae with endearing moments of romance (including a passionate deflowering over a hot compost heap).

Jasper Talbot’s fluent performance brings new agency and confidence to this beefed-up central role. When we first meet Nick, he’s a directionless but fearless postgrad student who’s attached himself to the moneyed Tory family of his old Oxford University crush, the bluff and uncomplicated Toby (Leo Suter). Officially, he’s a lodger in their Notting Hill mansion. In reality, he’s a kind of minder to Toby’s more interesting, more damaged sister Cat: Ellie Bamber is captivating and refreshingly uncliched as this upper class rebel whose manic episodes and dangerously truthful observations stop her wealthy parents from sinking into comfortable smugness.

Designer Christopher Oram’s production cleverly stops short of full 1980s period piece kitsch, making this story’s tensions feel refreshingly current. What does middle class Nick really make of the privileged world he’s fallen into? Initially, it’s unclear. Charles Edwards delivers a wonderfully likeable performance as an aristocratic politician and paterfamilias Gerald Fedden, who loves showering the clan with gourmet gifts from their house in the southwest of France and deafening them with thundering Strauss records. Like the rest of his family, he seems awfully nice. Even when Nick begins dating Leo (Alistair Nwachukwu), a young Black man working for a leftie local council, this family’s response is extravagantly, if excessively polite. But it can’t and won’t last.

Grandage’s deliciously witty production is so good at delineating the subtle class tensions of this world: the gaffes, the blunders, the ways in which outsiders are tolerated – provided they know their place. Even then, it’s never quite enough. “She looks like a country and western singer,” observes Cat, cuttingly, when the PM and former shopkeeper’s daughter Margaret Thatcher makes an appearance in a gauche sequinned dress at the family’s ancestral pile.

Nick is drawn to this snobby set because his love of beauty and refinement blinds him to their moral ugliness. Then, the murk rises to the surface. Holden’s take here is subtly moralistic, giving Nick a clear choice between humble true love and the false blandishments of wealth. What it’s missing, perhaps, is time and space to explore his agony as he’s crushed by the wagon he hitched himself to. But it’s still a wild, witty ride, powered by slow-burning anger at a political elite that’s updated its shoulderpads – but not its values.

On at The Almeida until 29 November; tickets here