Review Round-up: Critics enjoy Abigail’s return

It plays a limited eight week season at the Menier until 21 April 2012, before heading to the Theatre Royal Bath between 23-28 April, with a cast that includes Joe Absolom, Natalie Casey and Susannah Harker.

Matt Trueman
Whatsonstage.com
★★★★

“Like Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends, Mike Leigh‘s best-loved play shows the undercurrents of misogyny and material aspiration … Leigh’s play … is by far the superior, achieving all that Absent Friends
manages (and more) with none of the artifice … One now realises that Sue … is the lynchpin of the play’s continued success. Her plummy presence (Susannah Harker) … ensures the brash tastes of her horrific hostess Beverley Jill Halfpenny) remain rooted in class, not just the mockable gaucheness of the period … Lindsay Posner ’s
production thrives in the Menier’s intimate surrounds … It allows everything to exist in the details, whether of Mike Britton ’s intricately ghastly set or the fine-tuned performances of a cast treating plum roles with both relish and respect. Halfpenny borrows the needling nasals and lashing lisps of Alison Steadman’s original, but her Beverley is a more determinedly glamorous creature … Andy Nyman is fantastic as her husband … Posner gives us all we want … but still finds the surprise punch to silence our laughter. He controls fraying tempers and momentary outbursts with a conductor’s sensitivity and confirms – if further proof were needed – Abigail’s Party as a truly modern classic.”

Paul Taylor
Independent
★★★★


“Lindsay Posner‘s vibrant, splendidly cast revival of  Abigail’s Party …Mike Leigh‘s stage play… a classic of excruciatingly comic social embarrassment … Posner’s production will delight the fans … invigoratingly fresh new sidelights on characterisation … Halfpenny pins down with hilarious precision the infallibly undermining supportiveness of Beverly … But whereas (Alison) Steadman’s Beverly seemed like this by second nature, you are more aware here of how the control freakery is compensation for a marriage that failed … By intriguing coincidence, there’s another play on at the moment, set in the 1970s and dealing with unlovely male attitudes to women and gifted with a set that is a shrine to the hideous idea of domestic taste in the period. But Alan Ayckbourn‘s Absent Friends strikes me as strenuously (and slightly self-regardingly) feminist by comparison with Leigh’s play which takes huge, calculated risks in being misconstrued as heartless and patronising about the class-conflicted characters whose idiosyncrasies are here revelled in unwitheringly by Susannah Harker, Natalie Casey and Joe Absolom.”

Quentin Letts
Daily Mail
★★★★

“A tragicomic portrait of the hostile hostess, outwardly all gins, small-talk and cheesy nibbles; inwardly tortured, sadistic … Jill Halfpenny’s Beverly certainly looks alluring, all done up in a long, green, slinky dress, with eyelashes like ravens’ claws … Miss Halfpenny has the unenviable task of escaping the memory most of us have of Alison Steadman in this role. She succeeds … That cracking actress Natalie Casey de-glams herself to play plain plodder Angela. Susannah Harker, once so willowy, is a revelation as posh, matronly hipped Susan, mother of Abigail. Susan is a loser. Miss Harker catches beautifully her air of fatigued failure … Joe Absolom … completes the strong cast … The one trouble with Abigail’s Party is that so many people know it so well that
it has lost the power to surprise. But this is a jolly good production of a great play.”

Charles Spencer
Daily Telegraph
★★★★

“A night of continuous guilty pleasure … It is also a piece that divides critical opinion.
While many find it a hoot, others have complained that it cruelly holds its
lower-middle-class characters up to derision … Indeed I took that view myself when the play was last
revived in the West End 10 years ago. This time, however, I was completely won over …
Lindsay Posner’s superb production captures the palpable pain of the
characters as well as their absurdity … Mike Britton’s brilliantly evocative
Seventies stage design … Beverly, brilliantly
played by Jill Halfpenny in a performance that is simultaneously sexy and
repellent … But the actress leaves no
doubt that deep down Bev is miserable and unfulfilled … Natalie Casey, with her pendulous lower lip, proves deeply poignant as the
gauche and simple-minded nurse Angela … Terrific work, too, from Andy Nyman … and from Susannah Harker as the posh, unhappy neighbour … The play’s dark ending still achieves a shattering dramatic impact, even if
you know it is coming, and this terrific production must surely be bound for
the West End.”

Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard
★★★★

“In Lindsay Posner’s exemplary revival the role belongs to Jill Halfpenny … her performance is finely tuned, even if it can’t eclipse Steadman’s masterclass in nasal ghastliness … Halfpenny’s Beverly is … a magnificently monstrous creation, dominating those around her with her endless display of synthetic gestures, attitudes and phrases … Andy Nyman is splendidly fidgety, moving from a hollow geniality into irritable self-importance. Susannah Harker is spot-on as the simpering, repressed Susan. Joe Absolom’s laconic Tony resembles a spring waiting to uncoil, and Natalie Casey’s Angela is a perfect study in chatty monotony. The interplay between the performers is
impeccably managed. Posner has a skillful way with farce, yet also extracts pathos from Leigh’s writing … Leigh’s play will always strike some as a heartless and patronising caricature of pretentious suburbanism. But here it seems triumphantly witty – not so much a cheesy nibble as a fizzing mix of acute humour and slowly revealed tragedy. Rather than being a guilty pleasure steeped in Schadenfreude, it feels universal in its appeal.”

Simon Edge
Daily Express
★★★★

“Jill Halfpenny, stepping into Beverly’s heels in this hugely enjoyable revival…also gives her a sultry sexiness and some seriously seductive dance-floor moves that I don’t recall from the original … Director Lindsay Posner has assembled a flawless cast for Beverly to spar with. Joe Absolom is a glowering, dangerous Tony, while Natalie Casey plays his dim wife Angie with a compelling deadpan drone. A tense Susannah Harker bears the lonely burden of Sue’s cut-above politeness, cringing at the ghastliness but too polite to resist. And Andy Nyman brings a skilful blend of geniality, charm and ugly suppressed rage … Designer Mike Britton has had enormous fun with the set … Beverly, with her boorish insistence on taking control and forcing everyone else to want what she wants, is as vivid a gorgon as
ever.”

– Amy Sheppard