Abigail’s Party

Five stars

Theatre Royal, Brighton, Wednesday, January 16

THE phrase “iconic” may be used too often and is all too easily dished out these days, but the potent comic cocktail that is Abigail‘s Party is surely worthy of that accolade.

A packed Theatre Royal buzzed with people for whom, like me, the 1977 TV production of Mike Leigh’s comedy, with Alison Steadman as Beverly, is indelibly etched in the memory.

Sarah Esdaile’s sparkling production stays very close to the original, sending up social climbing and suburbia while adeptly painting a bleak picture of empty marriages and failed aspirations.

Jodie Prenger, channelling Steadman brilliantly, captures Beverly’s simmering passive aggression as she attempts to control everything and everyone.

A nuanced comedy that paints a bleak picture of empty marriages and failed aspirations, the play adeptly sends up social climbing and boring 1979s suburbia.

Beverly, waiting for her guests to arrive, sways to Donna Summer with fag in hand in a way-over-the-top psychedelic Seventies number that allows maximum cleavage and we know immediately that this is going to be good.

She plies monosyllabic Tony, boring but sweet Angela, and socially awkward Sue with gin, peeling Sue’s fingers off her glass to full comic effect to refill it until she’s literally sick.

We sense husband Laurence’s desperation in a charade of a marriage in which stuffed olives and pineapple and cheese on sticks become ready weapons.

Things which should be left unspoken are blurted out, the festering despair of totally unsuitable relationships laid bare with a perfectly timed barbed comment.

“Go on then, have your little sandwich,” Beverly mocks, the withering tone she uses for her husband a stark contrast to the flirtatious croon she uses for Tony.

As she bullies her guests to smoke and drink and dance against their will, Laurence is reduced to silence, immobile on the leather sofa, surrounded by people he has no connection with, in a powerful tableau of a drab middle-class existence.

The tempo goes up a notch in the second half and Beverly drapes herself around Tony’s neck in front of her husband.

“We’re not here to hold conversations, we’re here to enjoy ourselves,” she shouts at her husband as they fight over what music to play and he tries to prove how cultured he is by showing them a Van Gogh poster and his leather-bound Shakespeare collection.

Abigail’s Party feels just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago, and as you’d expect with Leigh, humour, pain and pathos are never far away.

The tragi-comedy of the final scene, with a crying, drunk Beverly waving her cigarette around as Angela performs CPR, is pure genius.

Catherine Eade