Doreene Blackstock Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★★½

“Grandage’s direction captures the intoxicating glamour and moral decay of 1980s London”

Should we love people for their beauty, or are people made beautiful through being loved? That is one of the central questions of The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel, now given its first stage adaptation at the Almeida.

After a seven-year publishing hiatus, Hollinghurst’s 2024 novel Our Evenings reminded readers of his deft treatment of class, race and sexuality in late 20th-century Britain. This adaptation of his 2004 masterpiece, directed by Michael Grandage and adapted by Jack Holden, feels timely again: a period piece that still captures the social anxieties and desires of the present.

The story follows Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot), a young Oxford graduate who moves into the London home of his friend Toby Fedden’s family between 1983 and 1987. The Feddens seem gracious hosts: Gerald (Charles Edwards), a newly minted Tory MP on the up in Thatcher’s Britain, and Rachel (Claudia Harrison), the moneyed, quietly controlling matriarch. Yet beneath their polished hospitality lies an unease—Nick’s sexuality is tolerated rather than embraced, and despite his education and charm, he remains forever an outsider.

The production’s strongest moments come in the first act, contrasting Nick’s initiation into the Feddens’ rarefied world with his tender, complex relationship with Leo (a wonderful Alistair Nwachukwu), his first boyfriend. The class and racial dynamics between them are finely drawn: to the Feddens, Nick is gauche and provincial; to Leo, he represents privilege and aspiration. Their dinner scene at Leo’s family home is the play’s emotional heart, Doreene Blackstock is superb as Leo’s devout Jamaican mother, layering issues of class, race, sexuality and faith with undeniable warmth.

Adam Cork’s sound design brilliantly anchors the production in its era. 80s pop anthems throb through the set, evoking the ecstasy and danger of the decade. Subtler choices are just as effective: a soft echo added to conversations in country estates conjures a chilling sense of distance and grandeur. Christopher Oram’s costumes complete the world—corduroy trousers, baggy shirts, and side ponytails secured with satin scrunchies perfectly capturing the aesthetic of the age.

The play can feel overstuffed. A vast array of characters and subplots race through a decade of shifting politics and private betrayals. Some secondary roles are barely glimpsed, though “Old Pete” (Matt Mella), Leo’s older ex-lover, leaves a lasting impression in just a few minutes on stage.

There are clunky moments: stylised scene transitions, on-the-nose symbolism (a line of cocaine mirroring the “line of beauty”), and some heavy-handed dialogue. And Talbot as Nick feels like a vessel for the audience to view this world rather than a hero: passive, and at times insipidly submissive, forever observing beauty rather than creating it. But Grandage’s direction captures the intoxicating glamour and moral decay of 1980s London, while Arty Froushan’s totally tragic Wani brings a raw vulnerability to the later scenes.

In the end, as the impact of the AIDS pandemic draws closer in and the hypocrisies of wealth and politics are laid bare, Nick’s exile feels inevitable. On the whole this adaptation of The Line of Beauty is a thoughtful, sensuous reflection on love, class and the price of belonging.

Equus

Trafalgar Studios

Reviewed – 15th July 2019

★★★★★

“to praise each element of Equus individually is unfair, because it is the tandem of these parts that makes the production truly divine.”

It isn’t uncommon to see a play emotionally move an audience – to make them feel the pathos or joy that the characters are experiencing. However, I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen theatre physically move an audience – to make them lean forward, gasp, and let their jaws hang for extended periods of time. It’s a testament to the power of Equus, then, that the audience member sat next to me – along with many others – barely seemed to even be in their seat, so moved were they by the ferocious and sinewy stallion of a play that was taking place.

Equus centres on Alan Strang (Ethan Kai), a seventeen-year-old boy who blinded six horses over the course of one night. It rests with psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Zubin Varla) to uncover the motivation behind the crime, although in doing so he is also forced to interrogate his own beliefs on religion, passion, and purpose. The story is framed chiefly around this patient-doctor dynamic, although a host of other characters are implicated in Martin’s analysis, including Alan’s parents Dora (Doreene Blackstock) and Frank (Robert Fitch), forming a claustrophobic and tense psychological drama. But the true genius of Peter Shaffer’s writing (also of Amadeus fame) is that this paradigm is only one of the levels on which Equus operates; bubbling under the scientific surface is a much more non-secular interrogation of the social and cultural values that cultivated the environment in which Alan could be compelled to carry out such acts as he did. Shaffer’s rhetoric can be transcendentally poetic, weaving metaphor upon metaphor into a textured tapestry that cuts to the very core of what it means to be alive.

The writing never strays into the territory of being overly-ruminative though. Ned Bennet’s visceral and kinetic direction ensures that the intellectual complexities of the play are being constantly physicalised and theatricalised, with the help of Shelley Maxwell’s inventive and raw movement direction; Alan’s bed being used as a trampoline on which he is brutally flung around under a vicious strobe light, for example, serves to manifest the emotional realities of the character. This is heightened tenfold by the soul-searing strings of the sound design (Giles Thomas), the unnerving, subliminal lighting (Jessica Hung Han Yun), and the slick and stripped back set design (Georgia Lowe). The performances, too, are roundly sublime – Varla especially is revelatory, fully owning the hefty language of his many monologues, immaculately delivering the thematic nuance of the speeches with drive and agency. Credit must also go to the transportive ensemble and animal work, as many of the cast also embody horses during the play, particularly Ira Mandela Siobhan as Nugget.

However, to praise each element of Equus individually is unfair, because it is the tandem of these parts that makes the production truly divine. The quality of the writing exacerbates the direction, which exacerbates the performances, which exacerbates the design, and so on ad infinitum. It constructs a whole reactor of impeccably crafted atoms, all meteorically colliding with each other in a seamless symbiosis that creates the nuclear level of theatrical and spiritual energy that is transferred to the audience and galvanises them to move. Equus is utterly celestial.

THE LINE OF BEAUTY

Almeida Theatre

★★★½

“Grandage’s direction captures the intoxicating glamour and moral decay of 1980s London”

THE LINE OF BEAUTY

Almeida Theatre

Reviewed on 30th October 2025

by Amber Woodward

Photography by Johan Persson

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE LINE OF BEAUTY

THE LINE OF BEAUTY

THE LINE OF BEAUTY

Trafalgar Studios

Reviewed – 15th July 2019

★★★★★

“to praise each element of Equus individually is unfair, because it is the tandem of these parts that makes the production truly divine.”

Reviewed by Tom Francis

Photography by The Other Richard

Equus

Trafalgar Studios until 7th September

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

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