Although it deals with the Aids crisis and with class, Alan Hollinghurst’s lofty survey of 80s Britain plays more like a comedy on stage than it does on the page. Partly it’s because the offline, analog, tabloid world of that decade now seems almost quaint (unless you were on the sharp end of its brutal politics and prejudices, of course). And partly because this tale of an outsider admitted to and dazzled by the elite, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, is as rarefied in its way as Brideshead Revisited or Saltburn.
After graduating from Oxford our aptly-named, middle-class protagonist Nick Guest (played with chameleonic fluidity by rising star Jasper Talbot) moves in with the monied, Notting Hill-dwelling family of Toby Fedden (Leo Suter), the strapping college chum he’s covertly in love with. Toby’s dad Gerald (Charles Edwards, born for this part), a newly elected Conservative MP, and his fragrant mum Rachel (Claudia Harrison, ditto) are warm, welcoming, decent.
