Michael Grandage directed Jack Holden's stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning novel at the Almeida Theatre.
Jack Holden’s stage adaptation of The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, played the Almeida Theatre in Islington from Tuesday 21 October to Saturday 29 November 2025. Michael Grandage directed.
Hollinghurst published the book in 2004, and it won the Man Booker Prize that year. It follows Nick Guest, a young Oxford graduate who moves into the Notting Hill home of his friend Toby Fedden in the summer of 1983.
Toby’s father, Gerald, has just been elected a Conservative MP after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory. Nick stays on as the family’s lodger while he finishes a doctorate on Henry James.
Across 1983, 1986 and 1987 he pursues beauty, money and love, including an affair with Wani Ouradi, the son of a wealthy Lebanese businessman. The AIDS crisis gathers behind the story.
The book has also been adapted for television, and its portrait of privilege and desire in the 1980s made it one of the period’s defining English novels.
Holden, an Olivier Award nominee for Cruise, wrote the adaptation, and Grandage is a Tony Award winner. The company included Ellie Bamber, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, Doreene Blackstock and Charles Edwards.