When it opened at Hampstead Theatre in April 1977, Mike Leigh’s now seminal play Abigail’s Party was an instant hit. Such a hit, in fact, that the BBC swooped in and filmed it as a Play for Today, thus immortalising Alison Steadman’s name-making performance as screeching suburban siren Beverley, who presides over the drinks party from hell. Forty nine years on and our admiration for this acutely observed drama of marital rifts, class consciousness and sexual frustration burns just as brightly, with a production starring Tamzin Outhwaite arriving in the West End for a limited summer run.
The scene opens on the perfect snapshot of a 1970s home, with dreadful wallpaper crowding in on the three-piece suite and the drinks cabinet. Outhwaite’s Beverley shimmies on in a slinky orange kaftan, dancing to the sort of music guaranteed to irk her henpecked husband Laurence (Kevin Bishop), a man who prides himself on higher cultural aspirations (he’s delighted with his unread leather-bound volumes of Dickens and Shakespeare). New neighbours, excitable Angela and taciturn Tony, have been invited over, as has quiet Sue, whose teenage daughter Abigail is hosting the unseen titular gathering. The drinks start to flow and Bev wastes no time in flirting furiously with Tone.
As Steadman established and Outhwaite confirms, Beverley is a larger-than-life force, a character we love to hate as she mocks and teases the others. She has an uncanny way of sniffing out a person’s weak spot and prodding at it, such as her repeated references to Sue’s divorce and single status and her disdain for Laurence’s effortfully assumed cultural preferences (Laurence is determined to like the olive, that upwardly mobile seventies picky bit). Yet however much we may relish our dislike of Bev, there is something in her that speaks to us all and our baser but instantly recognisable instincts, not least her sexual and romantic frustration.
Alison Steadman pictured as Beverly, with Tim Stern as Laurence, in Mike Leigh’s television play Abigail’s Party, first broadcast in 1977 (Photo: BBC Archives)Watching Nadia Fall’s enjoyable production, I was struck by a startling realisation about the agency, or lack thereof, afforded to all three female characters, in financial, sexual, emotional and professional spheres. Bev doesn’t work and boasts to the others about Laurence paying for any hairdo/dress/manicure she desires, but the mere fact that Laurence is the income generator and distributor of financial largesse is profoundly significant. What if he decided to withdraw it?
Angela does work, as a nurse, but Tony “won’t let” her learn to drive. Sue, with her firmly middle-class status and larger, older house (suggesting the others live in more garish ‘new builds’) is resigned to the fact that she will have to move somewhere significantly smaller in her inevitable future as a lone female when the children have left home. Pandora Colin gives a superlative – or perhaps that should be sue-perlative – performance as this unassuming woman who would just like some proper dinner, instead of the cheese and pineapple sticks presented on a tinfoil hedgehog.
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