The time has come to hand round the cheesy pineapple ones again, as Mike Leigh’s play slips easily into the Menier, 35 years after it first delighted audiences. If you eat in the theatre restaurant beforehand, you can even get a 1970s meal — chicken kiev, anyone?
The famous television version of the play has created such a large fan base that this is more of a tribal rite than a performance, as we anticipate the next crushing comment and tick off the elements of the 1970s decor: shagpile carpet, orange and brown patterned wallpaper, spider plants, fibreoptic light.
In the role that defined Alison Steadman’s career, Jill Halfpenny gives Beverly, the monstrous former beautician, a new lease of life and even lets us glimpse a vulnerability under that rock-hard bosom. Slinking across the living room in her long lime dress and fluttering falsies, Essex’s very own vamp welcomes her guests for an evening of drinks, nibbles and put-downs. In between, she humiliates her husband, Laurence. The visitors are their new neighbours, the gormless Angela and her monosyllabic husband, Tony. Also posh Susan, whose daughter, Abigail, is having a loud party next door.
Lindsay Posner’s nifty production keeps a perfect balance between the camp comedy of social aspiration — Susan looks down on Beverly and Laurence, and they look down on Angela and Tony — and the pain of a couple of marriages unravelling. There’s more than a whiff of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? about Leigh’s play, as the drinks flow and the childless Beverly and Laurence fight viciously in front of their guests. Beverly’s idea of female solidarity is that the other women should side with her against her husband; that doesn’t stop her from draping her arms round Tony as they sway to Demis Roussos, while Laurence and Angela cringe in the background. For all that Angela tactlessly dwells on Susan’s divorce, her own, very recent marriage also looks rocky. She reveals that Tony has threatened to stick her mouth together with Sellotape.
Despite a somewhat strained ending, the cast is almost perfect. Andy Nyman’s jittery, racist Laurence has all the unctuous patter of an estate agent as he tries to impress Susan with his collected edition of Shakespeare — unread, of course. Joe Absolom’s Tony smoulders with repressed violence and Natalie Casey is brilliant as the blank-faced Angela, who nervously prattles away.
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Leigh has been accused of encouraging middle-class audiences to sneer at Beverly and Laurence’s desire to climb the social ladder. Susannah Harker’s Susan makes one feel that the charge is unjust. She may, before her divorce, have epitomised the pair’s aspirations, but it is her constricted voice and excruciating gentility that most grates in a play that, like so much of Leigh’s work, combines hilarity with despair. I’ll be surprised if this production doesn’t move to a more upmarket address after its run here.
Abigail’s Party
Menier Chocolate Factory, SE1
