Abigail’s Party (tour – Cambridge, Arts Theatre)
It’s a long time since
I’ve seen such a good staging of Mike Leigh‘s seminal play
Abigail’s Party – and that includes the original
1977 London production. Tour director Tom Attenborough paces
Lindsay Posner‘s 2012 production to keep the whole thing bustling
along to make what are after all ultimately horrendous events in a
modern suburban living-room seem as mercilessly hilarious as the
people involved.
Beverly, slinking around in shiny emerald-green with matching
eye-shadow and a waterfall of tousled blonde curls to compensate for
the slitheryness of her dress, is magnificently disagreeable. She
fires off her selfish demands at her long-suffering husband and her
ill-assorted guests (who she plies with drink, canapés, unsolicited advice and
cigarettes regardless of their inclinations or refusals) with the determination of a
machine-gun operator mowing down a ditchful of captive rebels.
Then there’s Emily
Raymond‘s Susan, the quietly-spoken divorcée whose teenage
daughter’s offstage shindig is the occasion for this gathering.
Expecting a genteel before-dinner drinks party she finds herself
incorporated into a post-pizza alcoholic evening, with which neither
her stomach nor her maternal worryings can cope. It’s a subtle and well-rounded
portrait which sustains credibility and never descends into
middle-class caricature.
Also invited is
newly-wed nurse Angela (Katie Lightfoot). Designer Mike Britton –
whose brown-dominated set shows an eagle eye for social as well as
period detail – swathes her in hippy-inspired Laura Ashley-type
dress and cardigan, just right for a naïve young housewife whose
obsession with the grislier details of her work is designed to put
off any hearer, not just her laconic, monosyllabic ex-footballer
husband Tony (Samuel James).
When Beverly, that WAG
avant la lettre makes her pass at Tony, it’s made
blatantly obvious to her own husband Laurence (Martin Marquez) just
how inadequate she feels him to be. Marquez hits off the
work-dominated would-be culture-vulture finely (there’s a gorgeous
theatrical in-joke moment concerning Macbeth)
leading up to the climax of the drama. By then, what happens seems
perfectly logical and absolutely inevitable.
