The actor-writer’s new take on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel reflects the terror of the 1980s — but he also wants to give audiences ‘a good time’
There is a pivotal scene in The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst’s seminal novel set in 1980s Britain, when Nick Guest, high on coke and his seemingly gilded life, dances with Margaret Thatcher. “For me, that is him dancing with the devil,” says Jack Holden, an actor and writer who has adapted the 2004 Man Booker Prize-winner into a play for London’s Almeida Theatre.
“I’ve structured it as a Faustian tale,” he continues. Once Nick, the novel’s protagonist, an Oxford graduate seduced by money and power, dances with Thatcher, “that is him spiritually crossing a line that he ought not to have crossed. The rest of the play is him paying for that.”…
Exploring how Nick’s life as a gay man clashed with the era’s rigid social mores appealed to Holden for what it shows about Britain today. “We are still locked into this class-based system that is so ingrained . . . I think Thatcherism never went away,” says Holden, citing as an influence documentary maker Adam Curtis’s latest television series, Shifty, which explores how the British character changed after the May 1979 election….
Does Holden, who has form performing the parts he writes, wish he were playing Nick? “The control-freak part of me would love to, but he has to be younger and greener and slightly less jaded. And part of my ambition is not to perform everything I write. It’s tiring!”…
