The Line of Beauty review – award-winning novel charms in all the right ways on stage

As I arrived at the Almeida and started to queue to pick up my ticket, I heard a 20-something in front of me desperately appeal to the box office staff: “Do you have anything?” He cried. The box office manager laughed slightly and said “not a single spot.”

Such is the demand for this brand new stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel, faithfully shepherded to the stage by playwriting and performing firebrand Jack Holden (only on quill duty here) with direction from a stately Michael Grandage.

The Line of Beauty remains one of the defining novels of the early 2000s, an incisive portrait of class, privilege and sexuality in 1980s Britain. At its heart is Nick Guest, a young, Oxford-educated aesthete who finds himself living among the wealthy Feddens, a Tory MP’s family whose glittering social world conceals layers of hypocrisy and desire. Across a decade marked by Thatcherism, AIDS and the fragile allure of beauty, Hollinghurst traces Nick’s rise and fall with both irony and tenderness.

Holden’s new stage adaptation is a faithful distillation of that world – elegant, restrained and deeply observant. Rather than reimagining Hollinghurst’s novel, Holden translates it for the stage with precision, capturing its wit, sensuality and quiet melancholy. The result feels less like a radical reinterpretation and more like a refined condensation: a world of dinner parties, desire, denial and drug-sniffing brought vividly to life within Grandage’s clear, uncluttered production, with design by Christopher Oram

At the centre of the production is Jasper Talbot, who follows his acclaimed turn in Inter Alia at the National with another top-tier performance as Guest. Talbot captures the character’s knowing awkwardness with a quiet precision: his Nick feels at once benign and deeply flawed, meandering through a miasma of hypocrisy and opulence. You can sense his intoxication with the Feddens’ glittering world, even as he tries to hold himself at a careful distance from it. It’s a performance full of small, telling hesitations – a portrait of a man forever caught in a purgatorial battle between desire and observance.

Ellie Bamber is equally compelling as Catherine Fedden, the troubled daughter of the household who becomes one of Nick’s closest confidantes. There’s a sharp, restless energy to her performance, one that brings volatility and vulnerability to the stage in equal measure. You feel her absence during the plays final passages. Surprising at the close, however, is Charles Edwards as Gerald Fedden, the Tory MP whose charisma and confidence begin to fracture as his family’s moral façade starts to slip. Edwards truly comes into his own in the play’s slightly patchier second half, particularly in the scene where the Feddens’ prejudices are laid bare. There’s an equally mesmerising ode to the power of art in a well-wrought first act dinner scene, courtesy of deft performances from Doreene Blackstock, Alistair Nwachukwu and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, mulling on the beauty of faith in art.

Grandage’s direction is typically unshowy, favouring restraint over flourish. The production’s strength lies in its clarity: it allows the text to breathe and the performances to lead. The result is a piece that feels elegant and sharply attuned to the nuances of Hollinghurst’s world, even when the pacing falters in a few select moments.

It’s about as good an interpretation of a 600-page novel in two and a half hours as you could hope for, retaining the heart and the power of Hollinghurst’s central themes. What stands out most is its profound meditation on beauty in all its forms – the beauty of art, of love, and, finally, of mortality itself, against the backdrop of a terrible wave of pain and loss.

While it may be a play you admire more than one that wholly moves you, there’s no question that Holden has achieved something remarkable: transforming an intricate, interior novel into a piece of theatre that feels both intelligent and accessible. You have to applaud him for taking on a daunting task and making a fine, thoughtful success of it.