FringeReview UK 2025

The Line of Beauty

Almeida Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Costume, Drama, Historical, LGBT Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: Almeida Theatre, Islington

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

A line that shimmers. drenching Eighties summer privilege. Indeed lighting in Howard Hudson’s hands suffuses everything, making four years from 1983-87 seamless. Michael Grandage directs Jack Holden’s adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker-winning  The Line of Beauty at the Almeida till November 29. Grandage’s best production for some years, it was always likely to be a sell-out.

Holden (KENREX) though has ensured this Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot, Inter Alia) is both more a protagonist, and a bit more Faustian. Even if he wasn’t born with teeth. This Guest can bite when cornered and Talbot presents a ravishment of his own poised with an intellect and judgement that often breaks out. But is it too late?

Nick, invited to stay at his parents’ house for the duration of his London PhD by Oxford friend Tob Fedden (a hearty, aimiably entitled yet rippling Leo Suter) finds himself affably abandoned whilst Toby immediately moves out. Nick’s implicit “Cat-sitting” duties, watching over Toby’s clever, volatile sister Cat (Ellie Bamber) mark a transactional duty that paradoxically, offers redemption. Though Nick is watched and quietly judged elsewhere, it’s Cat, in Bamber’s soaring frankness and shivering truths – above all of anarchic fun – that helps Nick, and the production break out of any beautiful torpor. Bamber gallops and edges, swirls and delivers truths to everyone.

Cat, “unstable” in part because she has read the house and her circle, sees Nick hasn’t ultimately managed to, despite his clever accommodation. The one thing I miss in this production – perhaps because Cat’s last scene is so satisfyingly climactic –  is her warning to Nick. That would have completed an arc, allowing the production to draw more strength from the moral fable. As it is, there’s another scene for Nick alone that does heavy lifting.

In this narrative of clear class portals and exits, of AIDS shadowing them and money as a very different lubricant (at one point Nick has to point out that more than lube is needed these days), Holden marks the two acts with a climactic pact. It’s where Nick morphs from disinterested but fascinated onlooker to complicit passenger. It completes his abandonment of perhaps true love with Camden Council worker Leo Charles (a chipper, wary but warm Alistair Nwachukwu) for rich half-Lebanese heir Wani Ouradi (elegantly disdainful Arty Froushan). Trading himself up, Nick enters not so much the facilitating world of the Feddens; though he does that. But stepping into Wani’s orbit and a grand tour, he becomes an inheritor. And not just of money. Yet either lover would imperil Nick. In this production, a devastatingly simple matter of when is trailed. Ultimately Nick has bought himself time, at a cost.

Nick’s PhD around Henry James echoes Hollinghurst’s fastidious prose: gesture and silence, shaded and half-uttered things pulse through Holden’s script in place of zoning paragraphs. There’s looks, liminal lighting, and sudden tableaux. And James’ habit of always dining out at others’ houses makes Nick a subtly secret sharer (if invoking Conrad). Even James’ last words – “Ah Death, the distinguished thing” seem foreshadowed in the play’s last moments.

Charles Edwards brings a grace to Gerald Fedden you feel he doesn’t deserve. Yet of course it’s the thing that lands him near the top. Edwards pullulates with phrases, as if Gerald’s orchestrating his own speech, with “puss” for Cat. We find out he loves Richard Strauss. Edwards, always suave in a political role, also shows himself the real chameleon here: taking on the tone and every word of his Mephistophelian tempter, Derek ‘Badger’ Brogan. Robert Portal makes of him someone more entitled than we might expect, certainly at ease in privilege, not just raiding it like the vicious asset-stripping pirate he is. Portal makes of “fence-sitter” thrown at Nick a homophobic sneer out of a political disengagement. “Some people are rich” he barks. But Badger doesn’t show others how to cover their tracks.

Claudia Harrison’s Rachel cruises in a faintly anxious echo of Gerald: till her sympathy strips off and you see the class pugilist Nick has never sounded. It’s unusual to see Hannah Morrish play such supporting roles. First as Toby’s sometime fiancée Sophie, edging into small acting parts, glazed with Toby’s world as hers shrinks from her Oxford apogee. Then Gerald’s besotted PA Penny, who like Nick misreads herself into this sphere. The pay-off though between Morrish and Talbot is perfectly pitched as Nick wraps his conclusions on an unsentimental education for them both; if Penny will listen.

Christopher Oram’s giddy set with suspended ogee squiggle, tables and interiors swiftly apparate. They seem held in Hudson’s gleam. Costumes sheen around (at one point) the monstrous royal blue of Thatcher seen from behind.

There’s witty use of music in Adam Cork’s cod-Rococo sound, or where he deliciously wittily quotes Richard Strauss’s A Hero’s Life (‘His Works of Peace’ stipulated here!) as Gerald basks, as well as Frankie Goes to Hollywood.  But there’s also a moment with Schubert’s aching Impromptu (clearly marked as D935/2) which Leo switches on. It marks a wry cultural moment. Nick recognises it. Of course he would. But so does Leo. There’s a rapt moment when Nick’s privileged exposition quickly swerves to intuitively affirms the painting in Leo’s family house: Holman’s Hunt’s The Shadow of Death.

Leo’s mother Mrs Charles (Doreene Blackstock, warm yet adamantine) can never acknowledge the sexuality of either her son, or it turns out her daughter Rosemary (a teasing yet clear-eyed Francesca Amewudah-Rivers). It’s a subsequent scene with Amewudah-Rivers litanising the scale of AIDS in a small radius of people that brings home to Nick the roads not taken, or taken, short-cut or detour to the same place. That’s reinforced in the other world by Matt Mella’s older Peter Mawson, like Nick’s father an antiques dealer. Mela is unrecognizable sloughing off the chipper yet already shadowed older man as he glows into Ricky the quick-witted pick-up. Their differences are stark; their end’s the same.

Not the most theatrical story, it’s a heady narrative, transposing easily to a stark yet elegant Almeida; where another theatre might souse its bite. In such a balance not every note is sounded, yet most are. Perhaps something could be made of Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, which stands almost as a prequel. The Line of Beauty here is a dance to the music of a time that marred us. It still compels in a world where the barbarians are the true chameleons: who metastasise, as always, into the hatred they see in others.

Movement and Intimacy Director Ben Wright, Casting Director Sophie Holland CSA, Costume Supervisor Christine McGlynn, Wigs, Hair and Make-Up Supervisor Carole Hancock, Assistant Director Sophie Dillon Moniran, Associate Designers Bence Baksa, Alfie Heywood.

Published October 31, 2025 by Simon Jenner