The Line of Beauty - Turgid tale of Tories and 80s gay life flashes flesh but lacks soul

If I want to watch posh 80s Tories braying with careless privilege, then I'll turn to old Harry Enfield sketches or the recent romping Jilly Cooper's Rivals. If I'm hankering for a blank chameleon opportunist deliciously wriggling his way into upper society, then I'll head over to The Talented Mr Ripley or Saltburn. For a thoughtful, nuanced testimony to the early onset of AIDS in the gay community, It's A Sin is almost unbearably moving.

All of these themes plus drugs, mental health, religion and social hypocrisy are languidly yet pitilessly explored in Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel... and utterly squandered here as lazy satire, clumsily and crassly adapted for the stage by Jack Holden and unevenly directed by Michael Grandage.

Following the source closely, we meet resolutely lower middle class bright young thing Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot). He's come to crash at the Notting Hill family pile of his impossibly rich and beautiful University chum Toby Fedden (an impossibly buff Leo Suter) while he drifts along and does his masters in literature. Toby soon scarpers but Nick finds a permanent place by being thoroughly inoffensive and caring for troubled sister Catherine (Ellie Bamber) whose moods ping pong between high and hollow.

Across two time jumps we follow Nick's first relationship with laddish black Leo (Alisdair Nwachukwu) and then with tragic closeted, self-loathing and self-destructive Lebanese heir Wani (Arty Froushan).

The Fedden pater Gerald (Charles Edwards) is a slippery vacuous Tory MP, prone to dodgy business deals and affairs, given clout by the wealth of his wife Rachel (Claudia Harrison). Their neighbour Badger (Robert Portal) is a screaming cliché, an immoral asset stripper and vein-bulging bully.

Despite the cast's efforts, the leaden script leaves everyone relentlessly two-dimensional, particularly the men. Edwards and Portal can do this shtick in their sleep. Only Froushan brings a sense of a real, live broken soul.

We're constantly told by Nick and everyone else that he has an eye for beauty and that he himself is beautiful, but Talbot's delivery and presence are utterly bland. I get that he is an aimless soul with no firm political or social beliefs, leeching purpose and identity from others, but there has to be something that explains their fascination with him. He has a couple of monologues that I'm guessing are supposed to keep us spellbound and bewitch us with the magic of his sensitivity and soul. I felt nothing.

My detachment was compounded by the constant reach for cheap and jarring humour. A running gag about whether Margaret Thatcher will turn up results in Act One closing with the sight of her from behind, dancing to Don't Leave Me This Way. It's all a bit Spitting Image.

A three-way with a quick-witted labourer is played for giggles, until Leo's sister appears with some terrible news, a truly heinous gear change. A shag in the bushes is 'hilariously' interrupted by the monstrous Badger. An unfortunate erection pops up while applying sun lotion etc, etc. Snigger, snigger.

And then it all lurches back to elbowing us for our repugnance at the vile oligarchy, and urging our empathy and distress over the looming epidemic.

I felt nothing. Everything is so sterile, so staged, so leaden. I was there in the 80s. This production captures nothing of the giddy hedonism or the creeping terror we could barely acknowledge. The staging never feels immediate, the performances rarely vivid. Almost everyone is so selfish, self-absorbed, superficial there should at least be some viciously satirical pleasure in loathing them, but, again, I just didn't care.

For a show that bangs on about beauty, the sets are impressively unimpressive. The wardrobe is period perfect, but it takes more than a Sloane Ranger headband and playing The Communards to create a sense of time and place.

Hollinghurst borrowed the title phrase from Hogarth who used it to describe an ogee, a double wavy S-line, which he believed embodied the concept of beauty.

This production lacks beauty in tone, staging, script and performances. It is an artistic flatline.

THE LINE OF BEAUTY: THE ALMEIDA TO NOVEMBER 29