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Play For Today

Abigail’s Party

Obviously we could have found some better screengrabs than this, but... well, you've seen the bloody thing enough times anyway, haven't you?By Mike Leigh. Along with Scum, one of the few Play for Todays to have made a sizeable impact into popular culture. Alison Steadman gets grotesquely down to Donna Summer before hosting the half-hearted suburban drinks do from hell, revealing the proto-Thatcherite anti-social mores of the newly-minted suburban middle classes in the process. With Tim Stern as Beverley’s anti-social husband Laurence (whose weak heart condition eventually gets the better of him in the final confrontation) and meek Janine Duvitski as Ange (with thick husband Tone in tow). Add nervous teacher Sue – escaping from the titular party her daughter is holding next door – and a pentagon of mutual loathing and incomprehension is drawn among the Dralon.

Something of a cult these days (to put it mildly), rep companies up and down the land recreate it in minute detail – rare is the production, it seems, in which the leading actress will dare to move away from Steadman’s original swooping Essex intonation, or the decor away from the original MFI shelving/Tretchikoff painting/ice-and-slice chic. It’s a bit of an odd state of affairs, all told, that what began as a series of improvisations (the way Leigh always works with his actors) has become set in stone, as it were. This can tend to give the whole thing a seventies-in-aspic air that trivialises it if you’re not careful.

OK, the performances tend to grotesque characterisation, but the central thrust – of the dimmer-yet-forceful lower middle classes steamrollering the more reserved, thoughtful types on their way up, and disintegrating their own lives in the process – is more important than the oft-quoted Roussos specifics. Since these references litter the dialogue, and any major update would doubtless fail to match the wit of the original, this remains a problem for the play when seen today.

There’s also the problem that, in mocking the ignorant snobbery of the social arriviste, it panders to the entrenched snobbery of the inherited middle classes. Or, as Kenneth Williams, something of a snob himself but hailing from a working class background, put it: ‘Hampstead sophisticates knowingly laughing at all the bad taste lines. “Oh, a bottle of Beaujolais! How lovely! I’ll just pop it in the fridge…” And they fell about, loving their superiority.’ Any comedy of manners depends on a sense of superiority for the audience to some extent, but the use of snobbery to make a point about class aspirations puts the whole enterprise on ground as dodgy as poor Laurence’s ticker. To add to the confusion, many modern fans of the play (or those with broadsheet columns, at least) treat it as an illustration of how backward society was in the 197os. Ah, if only Play for Today were still about, we’ve got a great idea for an ensemble social satire. Let’s call it The G2-ers

11 Comments

11 Comments

  1. Lee James Turnock

    May 24, 2010 at 3:08 pm

    Dennis Potter hated it and wrote a scathing review in his then-capacity as a television critic, and I’m inclined to agree with him. I get the point and everything, but there’s just nothing at the core but sneering and finger-pointing loathing.

  2. dom

    July 25, 2010 at 10:46 pm

    Leigh is from the lower middle class background that the characters inhabit. Who else is he going to write about? Find the Mike Leigh play that doesn’t paint a largely unflattering portrait of people. People like Kenneth Williams & Dennis Potter ( two men who clearly had disdain & pity for people in general ) just felt uncomfortable with the honesty of it. Leigh is a cynical writer, but a compassionate one.

    • Paul Wild

      May 1, 2021 at 11:17 am

      Leigh writes beautifully about Law abiding people from poor backgrounds. Most people depict the poor as thieves and layabouts. People struggle but don’t resort to crime to end their struggles.Secrets and Lies is an example of his ability to talk about issues without having to resort to class and race to define them. You forget very early on that Hortense is mixed race , she is just the adopted daughter who happens to not be white who wants to find her Mother. There is no snobbery to any of the characters, just an acceptance of people at face value. The other interesting thing is that Leigh and Steadman are both Northerners but the setting is always dreary London hinterland towns.

  3. Paul Bovey

    January 7, 2013 at 12:46 pm

    I think the Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? episode ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’ offers a better critique of the social climbers of the time (described by Terry Collier as “promoted from the lower divisions”).

  4. Glenn A

    May 2, 2016 at 10:23 pm

    The Play For Today everyone remembers, and great fun to watch now, far more so than some Marxist polemic about a strike in a factory in Skelmersdale.

  5. Tom Ronson

    October 27, 2022 at 4:39 am

    ‘You all right Tone?’
    ‘Yes thank you’
    ‘Great’

  6. Glenn Aylett

    March 7, 2024 at 8:55 pm

    It was typical of any Barratt housing estate containing people who’d made it into the middle class at the time, or so I’ve been told. You were almost expecting Bob and Thelma Ferris to arrive and discuss their holidays ski ing in Austria and meals at the Italian restaurant or one of the guests to mention they’d been promoted and been given a Cortina 1.6 GL as a company car, nice car, you know, vinyl roof, push button radio, some wood on the dashboard, shows what you get for working hard. Abigail’s Party is the best by far of any of the Plays For Today and Alison Steadman was fantastic as the overbearing Beverley. Later on, of course, she would do even better as a mature version of Beverley in Gavin and Stacey.

  7. Richardpd

    March 7, 2024 at 10:20 pm

    I remember watching this a few years ago because my then Girlfriend had it on DVD.

    It’s very noticeable how it feels very of it’s time, with the G-Plan decor, music, even the ice & slice drinks make it so 1970s it could be a conscious pastiche of the era if you didn’t take note of the copyright date at the end!

    One thing to compare & contrast is the older Sue being more established middle class while the other four have worked their way more recently from the working class.

    My parents were similarly “new” middle class, but far less likely to “keep up with the Joneses” as often depicted in the media.

  8. Glenn Aylett

    March 8, 2024 at 3:02 pm

    @ Richardpd, it was very of its time and every town in England would have a housing estate like this where people who’d recently joined the middle class or were working class and had worked hard to buy a new house would move to. It’s not stated in Abigail’s Party, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the characters lived in an estate built by Barratts, who seemed to thrive on providing new houses to younger people who’d bettered themselves.

    • Richardpd

      March 8, 2024 at 10:07 pm

      We never get to see outside the house but you might be right.

      Wimpey & Beezer were other companies that were building new houses. Before council houses were sold off, the easiest way to own a house was to get a mortgage on a starter home. My family’s first house was a new built 3 up 2 down which was sold when we needed more room & moved to a 4 bedroom house, which was later extended to have 5 after my sister came along.

  9. Glenn Aylett

    March 10, 2024 at 9:29 am

    @ Richarpd, my dad worked for Barratts in Newcastle in the early seventies and we moved to a three bedroom semi detached house on a new estate in Crawcrook in 1972 as Lawrie Barratt offered his staff cheaper mortgages and this was a nicer place to live than North Shields, where we rented a Victorian flat. My parents split in 1973, so I have very few memories of this house as I was 5, but Barratt, Wimpey and friends were catering to a booming market of new middle class and better off working class people who wanted new houses and things like central heating and fitted kitchens that were lacking in their previous homes. Mostly these homes were built well away from city centres and on greenfield locations. I’d imagine this sort of location would be the setting for Abigail’s Party.

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