There is seemingly no end to the drama that can be wrung out of the lives of miserable rich people. Miserable rich people, with their jealously guarded little empires and their taste for refined cruelty and their toxic secrets and their sense that no level of wealth or privilege or influence is ever quite enough. Welcome to The Party, then: adapted by Sarah Solemani from Elizabeth Day’s 2017 novel and landing in territory that feels familiar but still able to bear minor variations.
As we meet Luke Evans’s political journalist Martin Gilmour, he’s spattered in blood and being interviewed by the police. It’s clear that something has gone terribly wrong. Via multiple timelines, it soon emerges that it could be any number of things. Martin (Jonathan Houlston stars as the younger version) is a working-class lad from Wales who, as a teenager, was sent on a scholarship to an elite public school. He isn’t quite as good at rugby as his background might suggest but in an otherwise unwelcoming world, he falls under the influence of handsome, entitled young aristo Ben Fitzmaurice (played as a teenager by Lucas Ely and then, by Tom Cullen).
