Mike Leigh’s genius satire on ‘70s social climbing can feel like one of those plays where there’s not much you can do with it beyond faithfully channelling the iconic original production (which was famously televised in 1977).
But Nadia Fall’s final show as Theatre Royal Stratford East artistic director (she’s off to run the Young Vic) manages to find a couple of clever new angles on ‘Abigail’s Party’ while playing to its long established strengths.
Most obviously, Tamzin Outhwaite is superb casting as Beverly, the nightmarish hostess of a suburban dinner party on the ‘London side of Essex’. Leigh famously devises his work with his original casts, and Alison Steadman’s original portrayal of Beverly is timeless. But her version and others I’ve seen since tend to portray Beverly as a creature of pure instinct, her grim hostess-with-the-mostess routine, acid putdowns of her husband Laurence (Kevin Bishop) and inappropriate flirting with her neighbour Tony (Omar Malik) feeling like something she couldn’t not do, and is on some level barely aware of (perhaps part of the reason the play’s detractors accuse it of punching down at the aspirational British working class).
Outhwaite, on the other hand, is wickedly calculating, a middle aged mean girl who deftly manipulates her hapless guests as a means of making herself feel better about her rut of a life, in which a veneer of aspiration masks boredom and mundanity. She is just awful, but she is shrewd and calculating – in the most telling moment she shoves an amorous Tony away the second she realises nobody is watching them. She probably doesn’t even really like the music of Demis Roussos. The fact Outhwaite is actually from a working class Essex background surely helps: she doesn’t have Steadman’s weirdly affected drawl, but rather sounds like somebody with a regional accent trying to lose it – it’s less overtly amusing that Steadman but also less mocking of the character.
Fall’s other innovation is to make Tony and his wife Angela (Ashna Rabheru) South Asian. The script hasn’t been changed a jot, but the programme notes allude to the influx of Asian migrants from Uganda and in the early ’70s, and moreover Beverly’s patronising bonhomie towards the new-to-the-neighbourhood couple is given a different spin here (as are some throwaway comments about skin tone and Indian cuisine). It doesn’t radically alter the play, but there’s now something of the condescending white liberal to Outhwaite’s admittedly very Tory-coded Beverly.
Other than that – it basically works because the play’s a stone cold classic. Many of the lines are gaspingly, immortally funny, and as a simmering study of passive-aggressive Britishness it is utterly peerless: despite Beverly and Laurence’s constant sniping at each other, the defining factor of this horrible gathering is that it never bubbles over into conflict. Everyone just kind of takes it and takes it until something so terrible happens that they’re forced to act. And it remains a very droll joke that we never see teenager Abigail or her punk-soundtracked party next door, we just imagine it must be infinitely more fun that whatever the hell we’re watching. In the final scene the kids crank up Patti Smith’s monumental ‘Gloria’ so loud it drowns out everything, a blessed, tumultuous relief.