22 – 27 June
On stage, a simple brick wall with a single window faces the audience. As the lights go down, a sensual figure appears in the window adorned in a flowy gown. She seems to rise up in an ecstatic dance as the wall before her disappears into the fly loft above the stage. Say hello to Beverly.
Beverly feels pretty good. Tonight, she has asked neighbours over for drinks knowing she is the queen bee amongst them. Hubby Laurence is an estate agent and there has been money enough to furnish their (bigger than the others) house with a leather sofa and chairs, a stereo and record collection, bound and embossed collections of Dickens and (unread) Shakespeare on the bookshelves, and a drinks cabinet that wouldn’t disgrace a good bar.
In the early exchanges, Beverly, dressed to kill in her swishy orange robe before the arrival of the guests, admonishes her obsequious husband for being too ready to drop everything to please his clients. Laurence is a man that has stopped having fun in order to make the money he thinks will elevate him to the middle classes.
The charismatic, very watchable Tamzin Outhwaite owns the role of Beverly. Seething with frustration with her ‘wooden’ partner, Outhwaite’s Beverly is every bit the captive bird seeking release. Sadly, it’s only the booze that really offers a way out.
The guests arrive. We meet Angela (‘Ange’ to Beverly) and her monosyllabic husband Tony, a former professional football player, who Beverly takes an instant shine to. Writer Mike Leigh has a good feel for English awkwardness. Beverly exposes her upbringing by, oh no, saying she will ‘pop the Beaujolais in the fridge’.
As guests and hosts labour to find common ground, Lauren Patel plays Ange with a high-pitched, almost shrieking voice which verges on cardboard cut-out vocalisation, but does illustrate the younger woman’s nervous need to please. Omar Malik as Tony merely has to stand tall and dark, grunting the odd ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Sue (Pandora Colin) arrives, altogether a much quieter woman, a divorcee, whose daughter Abigail she has allowed to have a party in her house next door. Banalities are exchanged while Beverly tops up their alcohol levels relentlessly, never taking no for an answer.
But as the booze flows, Leigh explores the subtext to this disparate group. Anger and frustration bubble just under the surface here, with Bishop’s Laurence particularly good at self-righteous explosion, spoiling the ‘polite’ conversation. Rows, but not violence, are referred to, while possible indiscretions are joked away into safety. Trophy household objects become pawns in emotional games of control.
This mix could make for a pretty bleak evening but for Outhwaite’s capacity to brighten the stage of which she is front and centre throughout. She makes us feel Beverly’s longing, her desires, as we stare in at this 70’s suburban bleakness, given lovingly recreated form by Peter McKintosh’s deliciously awful period orange and brown wallpaper and leather seat styling.
The play was originally criticised by Dennis Potter for being what he described as “a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes.” Leigh rejected this, citing the play to be more of a tragi-comedy, a lamentation rather than a sneer. “All my plays and films have, at one level or another, dealt with the tension between conforming or being your true self, between following the rules or breaking them, and with the problem of having to behave the way you think you’re expected to.”
Abigail’s Party is sometimes hailed as a modern ‘classic’. It remains very much a barometer of its time, but there’s a sense that, the character of Beverly apart, the supporting roles have been overly reduced, and that the many minutes of glass filling might have been better used to explore further depths to this rather sorry tale.
★★★☆☆. Simon Bishop, 25 June, 2026
Photography credit: Mark Senior
