Will a New Staging of ‘The Line of Beauty’ Satisfy the Yuppies’ 80s Nostalgia?

If Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities defined the 1980s in America, then Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty did the job for us here.

Both novels captured the feeling of that decade – the heady materialism, unapologetic greed and the sense, too, that on both sides of the Atlantic a great many people had got into the business of selling out their countries, their values, and maybe also their souls.

Feelings that find perfect expression on the printed page, alas, often lose their resonance on celluloid. Wolfe was badly let down by Brian De Palma in his film adaptation of his novel – a strangely clunky, humourless affair that starred Tom Hanks. Saul Dibb’s rehash of Hollinghurst’s classic as a BBC mini-series, meanwhile, turned out to be long-winded and boring with a peculiarly listless central performance by Dan Stevens. 

Sometimes, not often, you find yourself getting so close to books that you take it personally when film-makers make such a Horlicks of them: I remember both these cack-handed adaptations from people with no feel for the original books annoyed me intensely.  

My hopes are, however, high that Michael Grandage will finally crack The Line of Beauty in his stage version at the Almeida Theatre in north London this October.

Theatre is a lot more sensitive and intellectual a medium than film and I think it’s where this particular story has its best chance of finding a worthwhile new life and maybe a whole new generation of fans.

Grandage is a thoughtful, intelligent, and highly empathetic director for whom great actors, writers, and technicians want to work. His decade in charge of the Donmar theatre in London’s Covent Garden was a masterclass in cutting-edge artistic directorship: big star names, well-chosen classic and contemporary plays, and a seamless professionalism that meant there were no more highly-prized tickets in theatreland during his tenure.

Although Grandage has still to announce his cast, he has already guaranteed the all-important zeitgeist of The Line of Beauty will be captured by bringing in Christopher Oram as his set and costume designer. Auspiciously, Oram did a superb job of evoking the 1970s in Grandage’s original stage production of Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon – I recall Michael Sheen as Frost taking an especially evocative British Airways flight – and the ensuing decade should pose no great challenges for a set designer with his unique flair.

The adaptation is by the highly-experienced writer, actor, and producer Jack Holden: the Almeida’s outgoing boss Rupert Goold has described what he has done with Hollinghurst’s book as “one of the most compelling new takes on modern literature we’ve ever staged”.

For my generation, this production will have to be done right because the book and the decade were important to us.

We were, of course, all younger then, making our way as ‘yuppies’ (young upwardly-mobile professionals) and it was a tremendously exciting time so it’s difficult not to feel some misty-eyed nostalgia for it.

There was also an awareness – a lot keener in retrospect – of the cruelty to that decade: the casual indifference to the three million unemployed, the way AIDS had not elicited compassion for its victims but virulent homophobia that found its screechy voice in newspapers such as the Sun, and maybe, most of all, the country so obviously starting to lose its cohesion that was decades later to be laid bare with Brexit.

L P Hartley might have observed that the past is another country and we did things differently there, but the problem with the 1980s is that the decade is still effectively dictating how we do things now. It is the backseat driver decade that won’t ever let go and is still telling 2025 what to do.

Shut your eyes and listen to Rachel Reeves talking so coldly and inhumanely about her economic red lines and it might as well be Margaret Thatcher saying she’s not for turning. On issues such as Brexit and Palestine, Thatcher would almost certainly be significantly to the left of the incumbent Prime Minister.

Politics definitely took a turn for worst in the 1980s: it was the last hurrah of dull but fundamentally decent leaders like Jim Callaghan here and Jimmy Carter in America and a new era of style over substance, with the views and needs of the richest and most powerful counting a lot more than the poorest and most vulnerable. 

Old downwardly-mobile professionals such as myself – it’s the only way I can think of to describe those of us who formerly identified as yuppies – could be forgiven for thinking that, while we all had a blast at the time and quaffed an awful lot of champagne on expenses, it would probably have been better if we’d skipped the decade completely and gone straight from 1979 to 1990. 

The Line of Beauty on stage will be a fascinating, if bittersweet, affair for us all. 

Tim Walker is a playwright and journalist. He writes the ‘Mandrake’ column for the monthly Byline Times print edition. He was formerly a political commentator for The New European (The New World) and the Telegraph