The Line of Beauty
Almeida Theatre, London
⭑⭑⭑☆☆

ALAN HOLLINGHURST doesn’t shy away from describing gay sex — a rather daunting challenge for anyone seeking to faithfully adapt the Line of Beauty for stage. Perhaps more daunting still, it runs to over 500 pages and spans four years. The task is further complicated by the reader spending so much time in the protagonist’s head.

Jack Holden’s adaptation, directed by Michael Grandage at the Almeida Theatre, therefore poses an immediate question: will it work?

Mostly, yes. Holden skilfully distills Hollinghurst’s sumptuous description of metropolitan gay life in Thatcher’s Britain into two hours of stage time; the plot winnowed, but not beyond recognition.

We begin on London’s bustling streets as Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot), a middle-class Oxford graduate studying for a PhD on Henry James, arrives to lodge with the spectacularly wealthy parents of his college friend, Toby Fedden (Leo Suter).

Patriarch Gerald (Charles Edwards) is a rising star on the Tory backbenches, to the possible enthusiasm of his wife Rachel (Claudia Harrison) and amused derision of his daughter — soon Nick’s confidante — Cat (Ellie Bamber), whose bipolar disorder is brushed under the family carpet upon which Nick now stands, enchanted by the beauty of his surroundings and eager to make the most of London’s possibilities.

As Nick ends his first date with Leo (Alistair Nwachukwu), a working-class council employee, in the garden square of the Fedden’s Chelsea home, there is a nod to Hollinghurst’s frank depictions of intimacy (in this instance, modesty preserved by the compost heap) as provincial inhibitions are cast aside.

With Thatcher at full stretch, the story swiftly becomes one of hedonism along multiple axes as Wani Ouradi (Arty Froushan), scion to a multi-million pound supermarket empire, introduces Nick to cocaine, rent boys and a fondness for money.

These relationships define Nick’s arc, though sadly neither are depicted long enough on stage for their ultimate pathos to be convincing.

There are casting problems too.

Charles Edwards may look like a Tory MP, but he doesn’t quite inject Gerald with the full philandering majesty pulled off by Tim McInnery in the television adaptation from 2006, though Robert Portal more than makes up for this as odious millionaire neighbour Derek “Badger” Brogan, whose bigotry encapsulates the era.

Aids haunts the play from the very beginning, and by the second act the ghost is at the feast. People start to die and Nick’s world begins to unravel, as does the Fedden’s — though under the more traditional banner of Tory sleaze.

For a novel so rich in political themes, it’s curious that politics hardly gets mentioned at all. Mrs T appears at a ball, the rich are getting richer and and there is a glancing reference to “some Northern Ireland nonsense,” but the miners’ strike is absent entirely.

Arthur Scargill probably wasn’t a pin-up for many 20-something gays in London at the time, it’s true, but there was, with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, organised solidarity from one community to another that resulted in a decisive social change — the NUM and TUC’s new anti-discrimination codes — throughout the trade union movement. But it doesn’t get a mention.

The book was published just over 20 years ago, halfway between the era it describes and today. The play could be a chance to analyse its story within that temporal context, as a novel published at the height of the Blair years.

With Leo’s lesbian sister Rosemary (Francesca Amewudah-Rivers) enjoying a more prominent role on stage than on page, Holden is clearly aware of the book’s limitations.

It’s a shame he didn’t go a little further.

Runs until November 27. Box Office: 020 7359 4404, almeida.co.uk