Brighton Year-Round 2026
Abigail’s Party
Theatre Royal Bath Productions present Stratford East Production
Genre: classical, Comedy, Costume, Dark Comedy, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Theatre Royal, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Nearing 50 years old, a period piece might look as ambered as the tangerine dress Beverly wears. How does Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party stand up? Directed by Nadia Fall and arriving at Brighton’s Theatre Royal till July 11, this 2024 Stratford East production, with four of the original five cast, ups the volume switch.
Review
Nearing 50 years old, a period piece might look as ambered as the tangerine dress Beverly wears. How does Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party stand up? Directed by Nadia Fall and arriving at Brighton’s Theatre Royal till July 11, this 2024 Stratford East production, with four of the original five cast, ups the volume switch. Just as Beverly would choose: loud.
That’s not just the opening tableau of each act: a new device where Howard Harrison’s lighting shows dance-moves and strobe (should be a warning there). Harrison briefly adds a Miriam Beuther-style strip around the prosc-arch too. The actors’ tones seem initially hardened, almost acidic. In 1977, some TVs still had colour turned up loud. This production reflects the BBC’s pixillated classic taken from the second Hampstead run. That’s in the first half of this disastrous dinner party of class and sex collision. The second act sees something new, where the production eases into itself.
From Alison Steadman’s appalling TV Beverly everything here is accentuated, not least Tamzin Outhwaite assuming that role and subtly breaking out.
What makes this a painful perennial, one you should see? It’s funny, but beyond wincing at how we lived in the decade that taste forgot, lies the future tearing at it.
This isn’t Beverly’s party; the title’s a shift of genius. It’s outside where life goes on, teenagers getting it on. Go outside and you come back wet like guest Tony.
Abigail’s the daughter of Sue (Pandora Colin), unhitched member of this quintet. Divorced from an architect (she naturally doesn’t have a career) suggests a character in Alan Ayckbourn’s 1972 Absurd Person Singular where three couples interact over three evenings. Host Beverly cracks the whip like Ayckbourn’s Sidney where party becomes prison. Sue’s contained, liberal watchfulness is assailed in different ways by everyone except Tony.
Abigail’s Party brilliantly suggests not simply women’s agency and those who’ll vote for Mrs T, but however some might sneer, the beginnings of liberation. But of the class of this production there’s no doubt at all.
It’s not something Lauren Patel’s excellent nurse Angela and ex-Crystal Palace player-cum-computer-operator Tony (a smouldering Omar Malik) understand, till the end when Angela’s profession and her husband’s respect effect a turnaround. Aren’t they part of the future? It adds a strata to suburban living. And question-marks you can imagine in sans-serif black on an orange background. The only skew notes are new references to curry-houses and ethnicity.
Peter McKintosh’s meticulously observed orange/brown set sports a unit yoking hi-fi records and spirits bottles with lava lamp. It occludes a back-area kitchen and patio: a show-home for this aspiring estate agent and thrusting wife; not a home, with the ‘erotic’ framed print banished to the bedroom by Laurence. The lounge revels in an orange/beige three-piece claustrophobia with table. And pineapple/cheese.
With Donna Summer, Demis Roussos, Elvis and ominously Beethoven 5 blaring at key moments, Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s sound brightens the ears of the gods. Along with bursts of the party and siren outside. By the end, we’re looking through sound to James Cousin’s intricate movement directions.
Each marriage is at a stage of disintegration. Sue’s divorced. Abigail seems set to ditch Laurence: sexually past his sell-by. Angela and Tony discover their unreflective roles taken apart. So Outhwaite’s Abigail is more physically menacing, not just sexy. She’d be a force of de-naturing if she weren’t so natural. We’ve all known Beverly in softer colours but same leopard spots.
Kevin Bishop’s fine Laurence looks as if he’s endured a day buying and selling (his manner different to vendor and buyer); his winding frustration ratchets with audible clicks. Brilliant cruelties bandied with Beverly reach a point in the way Outhwaite wields a knife, with one disdainful finger. The battle over the records approaches Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Bishop’s Laurence laments his lack of creativity, reveres culture and aspires, hopelessly, to Sue’s level, as Laurence sees it. There’s space for Laurence’s mix of genuine feeling and snobby one-ups. He shares a dance with sophisticated Sue – whose Beaujolais, flourished by Beverly at empty-handed Angela, gets fridged (later on that became chic!). Still Laurence and Sue alone love olives – olive status throughout is one of those minute joys touched with brilliance here. Laurence is differently loud, wanting to share Van Gogh and Beethoven.
Angela’s literalness, her gormless admiration and lack of awareness of how she’s been treated translates as someone who knows deep down only too well. Patel’s Angela by the end of the party knows better. Tony’s ticking frustrations seem only partially expiated. Malik glowers a man whose talent expired before he was twenty-one, simmering with rage and sexism. To the excited Beverly who’s almost disappointed he’s not yet been violent, this Tony finally responds in a way that telegraphs tunnel thinking: in football, computers, sex. Yet in a crisis he realizes Angela’s worth.
Colin’s sense of Sue’s having drifted to a class she faintly disdains is quietly wrought. Her condescension, even gratitude towards Laurence for at least recognizing this is as subtle as her understated noes get trampled on every time by Beverly who forces so much gin down her she explodes with it to brief humiliation. Colin always suggests Sue’s mind is elsewhere, repeatedly pushing back Beverly’s cushion-arrangement to her own preference. Sue’s status speaks every aspect of her being judged by others. She’s lost a husband to another woman, can’t refuse being thrown out of her own house by a fifteen-year-old daughter for a party. Yet she knows how to endure a scene. Entitlement and manners get her through till we finally glimpse steel.
Outhwaite naturally powers the narrative. You realize the swish of relief when Beverly’s offstage, so powerfully does she suck oxygen, from oppressive bonhomie, to female bonding-as-dominatrix, to toying with Malik’s briefly dazzled Tony. Her lashings-out and the way she’s deflated is visible here. Yet even in tragedy, there’s comedy. The furious pace never eddies; the second act accelerates in a fresh take on the catastrophe.
Tom Paulin and Dennis Potter almost alone derided Abigail’s Party as “one long sneer”. But there’s compassion enough for everyone’s plight – including Beverly. As a study in relations this hasn’t dated. Sue might have to work, Angela be allowed to drive and take initiatives, yet dynamics remain as hardy as ever. We think we’re armed with better taste, because we’re pastel monsters, not orange ones. This is a superb revival; its tinted mirror keeps burnishing.
Associate Director Alex Hurst, Associate costume Designer Mary Charlton, Casting Director Amy Ball CDG, Production Manager Phoebe Bath, Props Supervisor Teagan Cutts, CSM Paul Ferris, DSM William Buckenham, ASM Cassandra Lyons, Wardrobe & Wigs Manager Bunny.
