Alan Hollinghurst , that supremely elegant prose stylist, was knighted this year for “services to literature”. Our Evenings , his latest novel, contains themes similar to his seminal 2004 Booker Prize winner The Line of Beauty : gay lives and class envy feature strongly, as do issues of sexual and social acceptance and isolation. Turning 400 pages of The Line ’s beautiful sentences into a two-and-a-half-hour stage drama presents a considerable challenge, yet it is one in which adaptor Jack Holden achieves notable success, offering up characters and situations that feel rich and compelling.

As in Our Evenings , The Line of Beauty centres a bright young gay man awed by a rich and attractive peer and his gilded family. The timeline here is 1983-1987, the height of the Thatcher

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