A stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel powerfully evokes time and place
Alan Hollinghurst, that supremely elegant prose stylist, was knighted this year for “services to literature”. Our Evenings, his latest novel, contains themes similar to his seminal 2004 Booker Prize winner The Line of Beauty: gay lives and class envy feature strongly, as do issues of sexual and social acceptance and isolation. Turning 400 pages of The Line’s beautiful sentences into a two-and-a-half-hour stage drama presents a considerable challenge, yet it is one in which adaptor Jack Holden achieves notable success, offering up characters and situations that feel rich and compelling.
As in Our Evenings, The Line of Beauty centres a bright young gay man awed by a rich and attractive peer and his gilded family. The timeline here is 1983-1987, the height of the Thatcher government and the Aids epidemic, with its concomitant homophobia, although Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot) is tentatively confident about his sexuality.
Just down from Oxford, he is lodging with the family of his strapping rower friend Toby (Leo Suter), whose father is the suavely moneyed Conservative MP Gerald Fedden (Charles Edwards). Toby’s particular remit is to keep an eye on charismatic bipolar twentysomething daughter Cat (Ellie Bamber) while he continues his studies and plunges headlong into the dating possibilities of London.
As the book’s title suggests, Nick is a lover of beauty in myriad forms: aesthetic, erotic and narcotic. This is the era of notable cocaine consumption and those little white lines of powder play an increasing part in Nick’s heightened new milieu of weekends in the country and houses in France, all stylishly and confidently presented in Michael Grandage’s assured production.
Suter, with a sweet shy smile, makes Nick a consummate watcher, an outsider looking in on a world that will never fully accept him, no matter how much he ingratiates himself and how congenial the Fedden family appears to be. Objectionable multimillionaire Fedden family friend Badger (Robert Portal, commanding) never tires of reminding Nick of this harsh fact, whose truth is confirmed when a number of sexual secrets find their way into the public domain.
Suter anchors the action as Nick chooses beauty over love and loyalty and he is supported by a raft of fine performances. Edwards is all entitled affability while the going is good, while Alistair Nwachukwu has a wounded dignity as Leo, the decent lover Nick spurns in favour of higher stakes adventures with the rich, troubled and closeted Wani (Arty Froushan).
Bamber is a highwire delight as the gloriously unpredictable and highly strung Cat, whose skirts get shorter as her list of ex-boyfriends grows ever longer. Come the final reckoning, atavistic tribal alliances kick in, leaving Nick to confront a multi-dimensional unravelling painfully redolent of its time and place.
A class act.
To 29 November, Almeida Theatre, London (020 7359 4404, almeida.co.uk)
