Abigail’s Party review – Tamzin Outhwaite’s Bev is Madame Bovary with a Cinzano
Outhwaite’s performance as Beverly, a precision-tooled showcase in hidden anger and longing, is a triumph in this eternally resonant suburban drama
Alison Steadman has cast a long shadow over the suburban gargoyle-cum-bored-housewife in Mike Leigh’s social satire about 1970s social mobility. So much so that her name is almost always invoked in relation to Beverly. Tamzin Outhwaite’s incredible achievement is that she banishes Steadman’s original portrayal of Bev as the definitive one.
Having first assumed the role in Nadia Fall’s 2024 production, that history shows in her polish and command of the character. The setting is a cocktail party in Essex and Outhwaite’s Bev (glittering dress, Farrah Fawcett flicks) is full of lady-of-the-manor pretensions as she serves up her officious rounds of drink. But there is a hard, calculating edge to her marital digs at estate agent husband, Laurence (Kevin Bishop) and her crude flirtation with guest Tony (Omar Malik, fantastically laconic), which she conducts with flamboyant disregard for his wife, Angela (Lauren Patel).
This seeps out early on, even before she has started to knock back the gin. She is simultaneously funny in her physical comedy and deadly serious in her put-downs of the workaholic husband who is not giving her the attention she craves, as well as her manipulations of others. Beneath her patter as party hostess is rage, hurt and an almost Madame Bovary boredom.
Her performance, and Fall’s production as a whole, proves that this period comedy of manners is eternally resonant. That is partly down to the genius of the play but Fall adds an ingenious tweak in the suggestion that Tony and Ange are of “Pakistani” origin. This transforms its meanings in a subtle but deft way: the area, we hear, is being taken over by different kinds of people and you imagine this not only being a comment on working-class mobility but racial diversity here in the “white flight” heartland of Essex. Outside Bev’s doorstep, it could be Reform Britain.
What does not work as well is the chemistry between Bev and Laurence, which lacks bite in the first act. Laurence is rather passive, and expressionless, the tension between them uncharged. The marital conflict does not seem ferocious enough for too long so you do not feel the truth of the friction between them when it bursts to the surface. They could just be George and Mildred on a bad night. In contrast, the fault-lines in Ange and Tony’s marriage are savagely revealed in his disdain of her, as much as she tries to cover it up with fake cheeriness.
It is still hugely enjoyable to see Bev flirt with the monosyllabic Tony, and to hear Ange’s inappropriate reflections on divorce in front of recently divorced neighbour, Sue (Pandora Colin).
She is the other guest at this cocktail party and the mother of eponymous punk-teen, Abigail, whose off-stage party can be heard in the background. For those who charge Leigh with othering the aspirational working-classes, not only through Bev but Laurence’s cultural snobberies, acquired in his ascension up the ladder (the framed Vincent van Gogh poster on Peter McKintosh’s orange-and-brown period set says it all), the middle-class Sue is key to Leigh’s satire. She is brilliantly portrayed as the socially-awkward, plummy ex-wife of an architect who tries to evade Laurence’s questions on the area and the class antagonisms underlying them.
He insists they listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony amid the rising hysteria and the record-player is truly weaponised, Demis Roussos used to needle Laurence to the point of near-violence. Bev is a such a glorious creation that you feel her disappointments in marriage even as you gasp at her comic monstrousness. But the darkness of the ending does not land. It is partly because there are unanswered questions around their marriage but also because it has all been so enjoyably comical that this switch to tragedy leaves Bev speechless and at sea, for once.
• At Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 19 September