The Line of Beauty review – Hollinghurst’s Gatsby-esque social satire is a class act

<p><strong>Almeida theatre, London<br></strong>Jack Holden has elegantly adapted Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker winner about class envy, gay culture and political scandal in 80s Britain</p><p>How to adapt a novel as big and shimmering as Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker prize winner? It’s a book that captures not just the hypocrisies of one elite, Thatcher-loving family but the hypocrisies of a whole era, with power and politics bristling beside the hedonistic explosion of 1980s gay culture.</p><p>Maybe it needs an entire series (as in the case of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/16/media.comment">Andrew Davies’s TV adaptation</a>), but Jack Holden, whose 2021 play <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/may/21/cruise-review-duchess-theatre-london">Cruise</a> traversed similar ground, makes a robust go of it here. He arrives at the dark heart of the book while filleting and mixing the order of things so that the timeline of the central three sections is shorter and slicker, but also less intensely lived.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/oct/30/the-line-of-beauty-review-almeida-theatre-alan-hollinghurst-jack-holden">Continue reading...</a>