Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty has been turned into a stage show directed by Michael Grandage. We’re in the early 1980s and Nick has just left Oxford with a literature degree. He lodges with his wealthy friend, Toby Fedden, in their family home and he offers to keep an eye on Toby’s troubled sister, Cat, who suffers from depression. Despite her disorder, Cat is a rebellious type who quizzes Nick about the intimate details of his casual flings with men. Her father, Gerald, wins a safe Tory seat and persuades Mrs Thatcher to attend a ball at their mansion in the country.
The prime minister’s arrival throws the Feddens into a panic but Nick saves the day by smoothly asking Mrs Thatcher for a dance. ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I would like that very much.’ Meanwhile Cat sardonically trashes the Thatcher myth. ‘She looks like a country and western singer.’
Later, Nick moves in with a rich, bed-hopping aesthete, Wani, who sets up a glossy magazine devoted to beauty. Their complex affair is overshadowed by the Aids epidemic and Nick finds himself unjustly accused of sullying the Feddens’ reputation. The mask slips and Nick discovers what lies behind the family’s glossy and manipulative charm.
This is a whirlwind of a show that transports you into a thrilling, glamorous version of the 1980s that never quite existed but might have. The brilliant frothy comedy of the first half gives way to darkness and betrayal in the second. Visually, the show’s impact is stunning because Grandage has assembled an exceptionally handsome cast. The females look like European royalty and all of the younger males could play Bond.
The set by Christopher Oram presents the novel’s sprawling topography on a smallish stage. He frames the playing area with two white neoclassical verticals which suggest grandeur without spelling it out. In the empty space he creates an antiques shop, a French villa, a chic yuppie apartment, a mansion in the countryside and the large kitchen of an opulent London townhouse. For each location, he uses two or three small pieces of high-quality furniture. Job done. Immaculate and simple. The female costumes are exquisite to look at and, occasionally, deliberately wrong. Toby’s awkward girlfriend, Laura, wears a pink frock and a velvet headband whose colours are too shrill for the snooty Feddens. She won’t last long and she knows it.
The performances are wonderfully accomplished. Robert Portal does a superb turn as Cat’s boorish godfather who hates homosexuals but makes no secret of his bigotry. An unpleasantly adorable cad. Charles Edwards, exquisitely funny, brings pathos to the character of Gerald as his ambition leads him astray. Jasper Talbot gives Nick a well-judged suggestion of anonymity that allows the others to shine. As Cat, Ellie Bamber brilliantly evokes the warped psyche of a highly intelligent but unstable teen.
This must be one of the best plays about the 1980s ever staged
This must be one of the best plays about the 1980s ever staged. A West End transfer seems inevitable and when it arrives in the centre of town the reverberations will spread across theatreland and into the wider culture. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll feel left out.
Hot Mess is a short, sweet injection of musical comedy that lasts fractionally over an hour. The weird storyline is drawn from prehistoric mythology. Earth is a lonely goddess who once loved the dinosaurs, especially the T. rexes, until they were eliminated by a comet strike. She meets a new apex predator, Hu (or Humanity), who lacks fur or claws but makes up for it with an abundance of creativity and brains.
A frosty courtship begins. Hu is infatuated with Earth but she spurns his love and refuses to help him grow crops or build shelters. Danielle Steers (Earth) and Tobias Turley (Hu) are a little short of romantic sparkle on stage and their partnership makes no sense. Are they married? Sort of. Might they have children? Apparently not. And their temperaments are mismatched. Earth is raunchy, demanding and self-confident while Hu is shy, submissive and fastidious.
Their story is played out in a semi-circular set neatly designed by Shankho Chaudhuri which looks like a studio flat in Shoreditch. But the characters don’t make sense in modern London. Or anywhere, come to that.
The music by Jack Godfrey is far better than most song-and-dance shows. His tunes are inventive and full of strange surprises. He’s a gifted lyricist, too. An exceptional talent.
The production looks like an attempt to emulate Six the Musical which has been revived many times around the world. But the material is faintly indigestible and the script is marred by its chippy sermonising about fossil fuels. Earth says she longs for Hu’s race to die out so that she can have sex with lesbian robots. Perhaps this statement unwittingly reveals the truth about environmentalists. They don’t want to improve civilisation but to accelerate its ruin.
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