“The Line of Beauty” at Almeida Theatre
Jeremy Malies in North London
★★★★☆
3 November 2025
Jack Holden, adaptor of Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize winning novel The Line of Beauty at the Almeida Theatre, thinks that Thatcherism never went away. It certainly comes alive here in direction by Michael Grandage as we see central character Nick (played by Jasper Talbot) penetrating the moneyed society inhabited by his Oxford contemporaries and their London neighbours.
Alistair Nwachukwu and Jasper Talbot.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
Across three sections (1983, 1986, and 1987) the play follows Nick lodging in Notting Hill with the parents of Toby (Leo Suter) who has been on his staircase at Worcester College. Props on Christopher Oram’s set and the cleverly chosen New Wave singles (sound design Adam Cork) plunge us into a summer in which Margaret Thatcher has crushed Michael Foot’s Labour opposition to win a second term.
Toby’s ghastly father (Charles Edwards) is one of Thatcher’s ambitious backbenchers who you just know will be loath to visit the provinces and will seldom be seen in his rural constituency. He and plutocrat wife Rachel (Claudia Harrison) view Nick with a modicum of respect for his intellect and place some value on his ability to soothe their self-harming daughter Catherine (Ellie Bamber). Thatcher might have believed in social mobility but perhaps the most profound words in the script here are Catherine quoting her mother, “True love can brook anything except class difference.”
In another evocative detail, Catherine is intrigued by the gay night club Heaven in Charing Cross. She is mad keen to pay a visit and scrutinize gay people almost as if she were at a zoo. Later, Catherine will talk to Nick about Donna Summer songs as rallying cries for gay men, with Hollingsworth’s almost subliminal point being that Summer would later turn on the queer community who had been buying her records by the truckload and quote scripture alleged to mandate heterosexuality and monogamy. This is a play about if not necessarily for aesthetes. Even Catherine says, “I’m pure feeling. No one should be pure feeling.”
The novel and its incarnation here as a play have much to say about 1980s culture. A highlight for me is the character Rosemary played by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers. She is the sister of Leo played by Alistair Nwachukwu. Leo was one of Nick’s lovers who has died of AIDS. In a scene during which Grandage draws on the technical abilities of his brilliant cast while Holden is going through the gears with intense and lyrical dialogue, Amewudah-Rivers describes her brother’s death throes in which he has been shorn of all dignity. Is it Anglo-centric, misguided, or even sacrilegious for me to say that I found this and surrounding action more heartrending than anything written by Tony Kushner?
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
I was entranced throughout the two hours 30 minutes, and scenes that grabbed me included Talbot’s virtuosity when showing Nick to be a walking Pevsner guidebook and Sister Wendy equivalent on art history. He may have come down from Oxford with a first in English (specialism Henry James) but he is captivating when he looks not through but at the fourth wall. Nick is talking to Rosemary and Leo’s mother (Doreene Blackstock) about her reproduction of William Holman Hunt’s “The Shadow of Death”. It might be a cheap Athena print, but Nick says that for this woman in her council house, it is the original. “It doesn’t find the moment it finds the history.” The group resolve to go and see another Holman Hunt, “The Light of the World” in St Paul’s. This scene is one of the most intense moments in my year of theatre-going to date. Hollingsworth and Holden have Tom Stoppard’s ability to make art about other art forms and yet still hit you in the solar plexus.
Nick becomes a founding director of publishing house Ogee. (An ogee is a line that swings both ways!) Oram’s set is sinuous and there are representations of Greek columns and scrolls. The presentation is all very Tory blue with Howard Hudson suffusing the Almeida’s bare brick walls with azure filters that set off Thatcher’s dress. With her back to us, the prime minister glides on for a cocktail reception. Nick’s social mountaineering includes (after doing a line of coke – I guess you would have to) a request that Thatcher should join him for a dance to which she agrees.
The supporting cast is full of homophobic Tory grandees, the most interesting being Badger played by Robert Portal. Badger is making a fortune as an asset stripper for his equity investors. Asked by Catherine about his fortune he says, “How much am I worth? It’s hard to say. It goes up so much these days!” But Badger can be more precise about AIDS. “They’re going to learn – the homos. Frankly, there’s no excuse for getting it now.” And of course Leo’s God-fearing, morally decent mother thinks that her son has been killed by germs that he picked up from a toilet seat at his godless, full-of-socialists local government office. And that is a source of solace for her.
“A death wish for the working poor …” is Nick’s verdict on Mrs. Thatcher even after he has danced with her. The plot of this play is still relevant; people doing two jobs but faced with sky-high rents are resorting to food banks. Thatcher disciples Suella Braverman and Liz Truss remain ambitious and are in the political wings. The play is historical but in no way backward-looking. More or less sold out now at the Almeida, I hope it has a West End transfer.
