With Stratford East’s vigorous revival of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, it is easy to see why this party piece has become a modern theatre classic. The play is based on Leigh’s memories of the 1970s culture of ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ and how it seemed to morph into a much darker mentality of consumerism and materialism just a few years before Margaret Thatcher came to power.
Abigail’s Party began life almost 50 years ago at the Hampstead Theatre, starring Alison Steadman, who was then married to the writer Leigh. Steadman’s acclaimed performance as the overbearing party hostess Bev inaugurated her prestigious career and garnered her the Evening Standard Best Actress Award in 1977.
The play became a cultural benchmark when its subsequent TV adaptation was watched by 16 million viewers, and fans all over the UK began to hold their own ‘Abigail parties’ and to quote the script’s most fabled lines.
It’s Essex, 1977, and Beverly, queen of her suburban semi, hosts a party with her husband Laurence for their new neighbours Angela and Tony, along with their next-door neighbour Susan. The booze is flowing, Demis Roussos is on the record player, and the cheese and pineapple cocktail sticks are primed and ready. Bev’s agenda for the soirée is to show off her various browns and oranges to what she considers to be her indigent neighbours. However, by the sounds of it, the real fun is happening back at Sue’s place, as her teenage daughter Abigail (who has turfed her mother out of her own home so she doesn’t cramp her style) holds her own raucous party.
As Bev tries to micromanage the evening, the seemingly ordinary social get-together soon spirals out of control as drunken small talk descends into unseemly coquetry, concealed marital discord is exposed, and social facades collapse.
As her swansong as artistic director at Stratford East before she heads off to work at the Young Vic Theatre, Nadia Fall has firmly set Abigail’s Party as a 1970s period piece. This is a wise move because, despite still resonating with the one-upmanship of today’s social media and its influencers, the play has undeniably aged.
Fall believes that this modern cult classic still has very much to say about acquisitiveness and social standing today as it “peeks behind the twitching curtains of ’70s suburbia in all its camp and terrifying glory.”
A character like the overbearing, supercilious, passive-aggressive hostess Bev is a gift for any skilled actor, and Tamzin Outhwaite embraces the role with relish, while Kevin Bishop is the perfect foil as Laurence, her on-the-edge husband.
Ashna Rabheru is a comedy delight to watch as the earnest people-pleaser Angela, while Omar Malik has gravity as her mainly monosyllabic husband Tony. As Susan, Pandora Colin artfully underplays the only real middle-class person who is actually present in the room but who is much too polite to leave the nightmare knees-up.
Nadia Fall’s crisp revival of Abigail’s Party is gloriously supported by Peter McKintosh’s set design, which is a busy exaltation to the alarming clash of cringe-worthy patterns and kitsch that often made up the 1970s living room.
