Theatre review: The Line of Beauty

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Oh no wait, it says Beauty.

  

Actor Jack Holden's second career as a playwright is really picking up steam this year, and after his breakthrough Cruise you can see why the Almeida might go to him to adapt Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 Booker-winner The Line of Beauty, another story of hedonistic gay life in the early '80s beginning to be haunted by the spectre of AIDS. But here the way the politics of Thatcherism tied into and affected that pandemic is even more explicit: In 1983, middle class Oxford graduate Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot) is transferring to London for a PhD, where he moves in with the family of his best friend Toby (Leo Suter.) His father Gerald (Charles Edwards) is a newly-elected Tory MP, tipped to rise quickly in Thatcher's government. The lodger is welcomed into the family, although there's a tacit understanding that he's expected to repay this by acting as a babysitter for Toby's sister Cat (Ellie Bamber,) who's bipolar and self-harms.

Theatre review: Macbeth (Shakespeare's Globe / Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank)

A familiar annual feature at Shakespeare's Globe has been the Playing Shakespeare With Deutsche Bank production created specially for schools, which gives away thousands of free tickets to students. Its popularity has seen it become increasingly open to general audiences, and after a couple of past productions were made available online during lockdown, this year's has been given an additional few weeks' run after the school parties have seen it. The fact that the shows are heavily edited meant that for the first time ever I felt able to risk a standing ticket among the groundlings without too much fear of putting my back out, so after over a decade seeing most shows at the Globe I finally got to be right at the front of the action, where Rose Revitt's design has added a deep thrust into the yard. As these shows are tied to the school curriculum I don't remember it ever being anything other than Macbeth or Romeo & Juliet, and the fact that this thrust is a blasted heath is a clue as to whose turn it is.