Although it deals with the Aids crisis and with class, Alan Hollinghurst’s lofty survey of 80s Britain plays more like a comedy on stage than it does on the page. Partly it’s because the offline, analog, tabloid world of that decade now seems almost quaint (unless you were on the sharp end of its brutal politics and prejudices, of course). And partly because this tale of an outsider admitted to and dazzled by the elite, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, is as rarefied in its way as Brideshead Revisited or Saltburn.
After graduating from Oxford our aptly-named, middle-class protagonist Nick Guest (played with chameleonic fluidity by rising star Jasper Talbot) moves in with the monied, Notting Hill-dwelling family of Toby Fedden (Leo Suter), the strapping college chum he’s covertly in love with. Toby’s dad Gerald (Charles Edwards, born for this part), a newly elected Conservative MP, and his fragrant mum Rachel (Claudia Harrison, ditto) are warm, welcoming, decent.
An aesthete with a fine eye, who’s doing a postgrad on Henry James, Nick is seduced by the trappings of the Feddens’ lives: the manoir in France, the eccentric ‘bachelor’ uncle with the country pile, even the self-harming neurosis of Toby’s beautiful, fragile sister Cat (Ellie Bamber). The line of beauty - William Hogarth’s term for the perfect s-shaped curve - leads him effortlessly upwards, into the orbit of another rich Oxford contemporary, half-Lebanese supermarket heir Wani (Arty Froushan). But in this world of privilege and easy wealth, not everyone is as straight as they seem, in every sense.
Adapter Jack Holden starkly fillets the novel’s three-act structure, from 1983 to 1987. He locates its mid-point climax as the moment when Nick, delirious on his first line of cocaine, dances at a house party with Margaret Thatcher. Hollinghurst draws parallels between the hypocritical morality of 80s Conservatism – one year out from passing the anti-gay Section 28 legislation in 1988, but itself beset by scandals around sex and “creative accounting” – and the schismatic nature of homosexuality in the 80s.
Nick is out and open if not exactly proud – he’s apolitical, even when it comes to sex. But his liaisons are necessarily arranged through small ads in magazines and conducted in select pubs and gated gardens. He and his first love Leo (Alistair Nwachukwu), a black employee of “lefty” Camden Council, feign a straight friendship to avoid upsetting his religious mother, and Nick won’t hold his hand. Later, the code of silence and secrecy begins to crack open as Aids lays waste to a generation.
The moment when Leo’s sister (a powerfully understated Francesca Amewudah-Rivers) visits Nick to tell him of her brother’s death is when reality intrudes, and Michael Grandage’s production ceases to be entirely breezy. Until then, there’s little sense of the world outside a gilded stratum of privilege, apart from very occasional mutterings about unemployment and the dole.
And it must be said that, stripped of Hollingshust’s elegantly descriptive prose, that golden tier feels somewhat cartoonish and full of stereotypes here. Robert Portal plays a blusteringly arrogant asset stripper called Badger (yes, really) to offset Gerald’s patrician geniality. Bamber’s Cat, zigzagging erratically through the action in a series of thigh-skimming 80s frocks, is an obvious symbol of the rot and guilt beneath the Feddens’ tum-stroking complacency. Nick’s discourses on William Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death, or the difference between baroque and rococo furniture, feel shoehorned in.
Still, this is a hugely entertaining skim across the shiny surface of 80s Britain, and a return to form for Grandage after a high-profile misfires including My Master Builder and Backstairs Billy. Designer Christopher Oram leaves the stage mostly bare, so the era is evoked through boxy suits, espadrilles, and a soundtrack that embraces New Order and Frankie Goes to Hollywood as well as the remixed disco of Donna Summer. Talbot, Edwards, Harrison and Amedwudah-Rivers stand out from a fine ensemble. The production is also timely, part of a current reappraisal of all that was great and all that was ghastly about the 80s.
To 29 Nov, Almeida.co.uk.
