In 1977, British director, Mike Leigh worked with a small group of actors to develop an idea he had for a play, a comedy of manners, in the form of a suburban situation comedy satirising the aspiring middle class emerging in 1970s Britain. The play was called Abigail’s Party and opened at Hampstead Theatre in April; later that year, in November, a recording was made for the BBC’s Play for Today.
Beverly and Laurence (Alison Steadman and Tim Stern) are holding a drinks party for their new neighbours Angela and Tony (Janine Duvitski and John Salthouse), along with another neighbour, Sue (Harriet Reynolds), whose teenage daughter Abigail (whom we never see) is holding a party next door. Leigh got his actors to build their characters through repeated improvisations and the cast largely constructed their own characters’ back stories themselves. The result is a rich tapestry of characterisation.
Alison Steadman’s aspirational Beverly is the star of the show. She slinks like a cat around her kitsch living room, cigarette and drink in hand, and you just know she’s feeling sophisticated and oh-so-modern. She’s got the latest gadgets in her kitchen but doesn’t know how to use them. She has the rug, the drinks cabinet and built-in record player, the cigarette case on the coffee table, along with a host of other pretensions…in her mind, she has clearly “arrived”, though her Estuary English points perhaps to a different background: a former life as a department store cosmetics demonstrator. She dominates her husband who, though he has clearly made her lifestyle possible by working long hours as an estate agent, is constantly hen-pecked and undermined by Beverly, to the extent that he becomes increasingly neurotic as the play progresses. The cracks in the suburban facade are evident.
The plays is at turns amusing and excruciating, especially to those of us old enough to have had some real-life insight into seventies suburbia. Watch this glorious scene as Beverly, with barely-veiled irritation at her husband’s lack of pliancy, cajoles him to put contemporary crooner Demis Roussos onto the record player (could Mike Leigh have picked a funnier example of an inherently-seventies artiste?).
So please…do you think we can have Demis Roussos on…?
