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…?