Abigail’s Party is Mike Leigh’s classic dark comedy of manners and mores, set in an outer London suburb on the borders with Essex, where the emergent middle classes are buying their new-builds. This is a two-act play with five characters – newly-weds Tony and Angela, and our hosts Lawrence and Beverley. They are joined by Sue, divorced, middle-class, and worried out of her mind about the party her 15-year-old daughter is holding at their home. The eponymous Abigail, like Godot, never appears.
They talk, flirt, eat crisps, dance, smoke, and drink enough spirits to sink a battleship, as people tended to do in the 1970s. She asks for sherry, but working-class-made-good Beverley is all out of sherry. So gin it must be. Pandora Colin is especially brilliant at revealing Sue’s mounting anxiety through the straight lace of English reserve.
The English class system is hard to explain, but the subtle differences in social status between the characters is played out in their language, clothes, food, drinks, habits, prejudices, and tastes. Things turn nasty quickly as simmering tensions are unleashed by gallons of booze, and Number 13, Richmond Road, turns out to be very unlucky for one.
It must be hard to take on a role like the awful hostess Beverley Moss when it is so firmly associated with another actor. Alison Steadman owns the role of Beverly so surely that is difficult to not hear her nasal intonation of ‘Ange’ ‘little top-up’ and ‘cheesy pineapple one’ as Tamsin Outhwaite delivers the famous lines. There were occasions when it sounded like Outhwaite doing an impression of Steadman playing Beverley.
Overall, though, Outhwaite brings out a darker, more menacing, more predatory, and even more monstrous depiction of Beverley. Monstrous is the word. Not because of her social faux-pas or what Leigh sees as her bad taste in art and music, but of her narcissism, manipulation of the characters around her, and viciousness towards her estate agent husband. She freely admits to only staying with him for his money. As she drives him to cardiac arrest (liberally foreshadowed throughout), even his death scene is all about her. She is angry with Lawrence for the way he lived, and now she is angry with him for the way he dies.
If you remember the 1970s, Abigail’s Party is a nostalgia-fest. The references to Majorca, Bacardi and coke, James Galway, Estee Lauder, Aspro, the unused rotisserie machine in the kitchen, and of course the famous deployment of Demis Roussos as the true metaphor for Beverley’s awfulness, locks Leigh’s drama into the very specific time of the late 1970s. Like Fawlty Towers or The Good Life, this was not written as a work about the 1970s, but with the passage of time it has become one.
Special mention to Peter McKintosh for the 1970s staging. The sitcom-style sitting room is pitch perfect. Seriously, it belongs in the V&A. The (now-trendy) G-plan bookcase and tables, green BT phone, the ceramic kitchen jars, fibre light, stereo system, fridge-freezer, gold-embossed new editions of Dickens and Shakespeare and that terrible kitsch ‘erotic’ artwork Wings of Love. We are treated to interval music from Kate Bush, ELO, Dolly Parton, Abba, and Wild Cherry, and up Richmond Road we can hear the teenagers are partying to the album Horses by Patti Smith which is exactly right.
Thank heavens Nadia Fall has not attempted to ‘update’ the play. The characters cheerfully smoke their way through the two hours, pausing only to debate whether cigarettes are really all that bad for you. They pile through endless gin and tonics and light ales. The jokey reference to a bunch of 15-year-old schoolgirls ‘raping’ the laconic Tony is fairly horrific, and caused a sharp intake of breath on the night I saw it.
Abigail’s Party is about social class. Mike Leigh has always maintained that his work is a sneer-free zone. However, there is perhaps something distasteful about the sophisticated Hampsted set looking down on the aspirant lower middle classes. These are the people born in the 1940s, coming into their own in the 1970s, getting a £21k mortgage and getting fitted carpets, owning their own car (even if it doesn’t start), and taking holidays in Palma Nova. They are classic ‘C2s’ in marketing-speak: aspirational, ambitious and unaware that Beaujolais doesn’t belong in the fridge (although now that we know it does, Beverley is vindicated at last).
Paul Richards is a broadcaster, writer and reviewer. His latest book How to Write a Parliamentary Speech is out in October.
Comedy Drama
By Mike Leigh
Cast Includes: Kevin Bishop; Pandora Colin; Omar Malik; Tamzin Outhwaite; Ashna Rabheru
Until 12 October 2024
Running Time: two hours with one interval
Photo credit: Mark Senior