Our Evenings follows an actor through 60 years of treading the boards and holds up a mirror to how society has shapeshifted

Alan Hollinghurst’s remarkable new novel, Our Evenings, is many things. A moving portrait of a gay actor, Dave Win, of Anglo-Burmese origin. A state-of-the-nation novel about the transition from the liberated 60s to the period of Brexit and Covid. A study of a changing landscape in which a market town’s identity is forever altered by pizza parlours and supermarkets. But less noticed has been Hollinghurst’s forensically accurate picture of British theatre over the last 60 years. The author’s own involvement in theatre has been mainly as a translator of Racine but he shows an acute understanding of an actor’s psyche and the artform’s politics.

Even Dave’s character is gradually revealed through his theatrical tastes. Early on we learn that at school he longs to play Antonio rather than Fabian in Twelfth Night: the first hint of his sexual inclinations. He shows a talent for mimicking his masters and when he reads a scene with a famous French actor he has a coup de foudre. “In that moment,” he says, “I felt something fizz inside me, a certainty that went beyond acting.” Although ferociously bullied by his school contemporary, Giles Hadlow, and frequently mocked for his ethnicity, Dave discovers himself through role-play.