The Line of Beauty at the Almeida review and star rating: ★★★★
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty is considered alongside The Normal Heart and Angels in America to be one of the seminal queer texts confronting the AIDS pandemic. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 but is more interested in queer joy than fixating on the misery, aligning it with Russell T Davies’ landmark pandemic-era Channel 4 drama It’s A Sin.
Jack Holden and Michael Grandage’s horny, hilarious production surely stages every single internal desire of the text’s yearning protagonist Nick Guest; its bulging, popping, flexing male cast catwalking the Almeida stage to the thunderous beats of the era with only scraps of clothing protecting their modesty.
It isn’t just beautiful but dramatically effective in conveying the draw of these men to one another, exacerbated through internalised and forbidden lust. When Nick, played by newcomer Jasper Talbot, kisses Leo, played by Alistair Nwachukwu, for the first time, you can feel the literal decades of desire come into fruition. When they finally have sex in a park, the only place they realistically can, I’ve never gunned for anyone so hard in my life.
Hollinghurst’s story is perhaps too linear for the stage, although Holden – a talented London writer from Kenrex and Cruise, another AIDS-themed play – succeeds at translating the text’s whimsy and pace. Grandage brings these men into the abstract, visualising moods – existential inquiry, anger, horniness – with some beautiful choreography between conventional dialogue-driven scenes.
Talbot shines as lead Nick, a young gay man thrust amongst London high society when he moves in with his best friend’s posho family in Kensington. Nwachukwu pops as working class boyfriend Leo; Arty Froushan is utterly compelling later as Nick’s charismatic lover Wani. The young men oscillate within a socially conservative, monied set who performatively have their back but not necessarily when it counts. Via minimal, effective prop use we are convincingly transported to poolsides in the south of France, and to waspish bookshops on Portobello Road.
The Line of Beauty at the Almeida: Jack Holden succeeds in bringing these men to the stage
The balance between platforming the tragedy of the AIDS era and celebrating the joy despite it all is an obviously tricky tonal tightrope. It is totally valid to say that queer people don’t need another trauma story. But when the disease is confronted on stage, Hollinghurst’s light touch doesn’t quite land. It feels like one minute we’re cavorting around the pool with a gin and tonic and the next we’re confronting the tragic passing of someone in scenes that are juxtaposed perhaps a little crassly.
Set against the backdrop of Thatcher and a Britain whose moral compass is skewed between the socially progressive codes of post-legalisation and the dregs of stigma that still existed in the day, The Line of Beauty is nevertheless a beautiful and often touching frivolity.
The Line of Beauty is playing at The Almeida until 29 November