Tamzin Outhwaite reprises her role as the ghastly, egomaniac Beverley in Mike Leigh's 1977 play Abigail's Party, now running at the Harold Pinter Theatre. After an un-vain performance as the needy Kath in Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Young Vic last year, Outhwaite embraces the grotesque wholeheartedly.
In a diaphanous orange frock and ratted Farrah Fawcett wig, inserting one cigarette after another into her raptor's rictus grin, Outhwaite gives a monstrous, physically precise tour de force. Her Beverley is vulgar and self-centred, determined to bend neighbours to her will at her sphincter-tighteningly awkward drinks party.
A seething bitterness
A seething bitterness in her childless marriage to estate agent Laurence (Kevin Bishop) leads her to flirt with and fondle Tony (Omar Malik), the strapping, stolid husband of chatterbox nurse Ange (Lauren Patel). In Nadia Fall's energetic production, first seen at Stratford East in 2024, the casting of these two as Asian adds a frisson to the casually racist chat about “coloured chaps” and even about curly hair.
Leigh's play, developed for the stage through improvisation with a cast including his then-wife Alison Steadman and immediately immortalised in a BBC Play for Today, has mutated over its nearly 50-year life. Originally it was a downward-punching satire of the nouveau borgeouisie of the 70s, with their G-Plan furniture, embossed editions of Dickens and Woolworth's art prints.
Walthamstow and stiff gins are fashionable again
The character of Sue (played here with wincing delicacy by Pandora Colin), whose unseen but apparently punky 15-year-old daughter Abigail is having a drunken teenage party across the street, was surely the original audience's upper-middle-class avatar. A longer-term resident of this burgeoning suburban enclave of Walthamstow, divorced from her architect husband, she's less keen than Beverley and Ange on getting rat-arsed on gin.
Now, though, Walthamstow and stiff gins are fashionable again, and Peter McKintosh's set and costume design looks cool rather than naff. The orange block-print curtains, room dividers and the kitschy painting over which Beverley and Laurence fall out (Stephen Pearson's Wings of Love - a naked fantasy couple framed by a giant swan's wings) are covetably retro. Even Demis Roussos, cheese and pineapple hedgehogs and Beverley's green eye shadow have come through the irony timewarp.
A mannered performance among other mannered performances
Outhwaite's every gesture, every wag of her sandalled ankle, reeks of self-satisfaction and command. It is, to be sure, a mannered performance among other mannered performances: Tony's monosyllabic, almost Buster-Keaton-ish absence of expression; Ange's endless prattling.
But Abigail's Party was never a naturalistic slice of life: it's a distilled act of comic mockery. Its faux-demotic tone of voice (“just going toilet!”) has become so familiar, from the 1977 TV version and from so many of Leigh's later works, that any revival today inevitably sounds like a pastiche. Seeing this staging again, I realised how much Julia Davis's Jill in Nighty Night owed to Beverley, particularly her seeing drama in a crisis and dropping fag-ash over her inert husband.
Nadia Fall directs with a fine sense of comic timing, and nods to the play's iconic status with expressionistic curtain-raisers for the first and second acts. First Beverley, dancing alone on a coffee table under a disco ball to Donna Summer's I Feel Love; then a vision of all the characters, glitchily re-enacting physical tropes of drinking and yakking as if stuck on pause in a 70s VHS recorder. Each act also ends on a snap lighting change; on Bev, hog-whimperingly drunk on all fours, and stricken in a corner. Both superbly done by Outhwaite.
