'Abigail's Party' review — Tamzin Outhwaite has formidable diva chops as narcissist Beverly

Read our review of Mike Leigh's play Abigail's Party, now in performances at the Harold Pinter Theatre to 19 September.

Summary

• Mike Leigh's seminal play Abigail's Party comes to the Harold Pinter Theatre
• Tamzin Outhwaite is outstanding as narcissist Beverly
• Nadia Fall's production features an ideally garish 1970s design

Following the recent death of the great Penelope Keith, a great many column inches were devoted to her fabulous wardrobe as loveable snob Margo on The Good Life. Tamzin Outhwaite only gets one outfit for her turn as upwardly mobile Essex suburbanite Beverly in Abigail’s Party, but it is a stunner – a diaphanous yellow-orange number that’s ideal for regally wafting around in. Combined with Outhwaite’s height, accentuated by a pair of silver platform shoes, and topped off with a bouffant wig that’s like a lion’s mane, she looks like a Roman goddess for the 1970s.

Nadia Fall’s revival of Mike Leigh’s 1977 breakthrough work was first performed at Theatre Royal Stratford East (Fall’s first artistic directorship before she took over at the Young Vic) in 2024 and now comes to the West End following a tour for a short late-summer run. The way in which it originally captured a zeitgeist and was developed through improvisation, blending elements of a middlebrow sitcom with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was groundbreaking in its time and has influenced any amount of cringe comedy over the past half-century (the recent Amandaland is a prime example). But how well it stands on is less certain – while much of the audience was in stitches, my response to the humour was more muted.

Fall’s production is broadly sympathetic and solidly performed, if a little “light”. There’s no plot as such and it’s held together by banal pleasantries laced with passive aggression and alcoholic top-ups. Beverly's guests are new arrivals, the endearingly gormless Angela (Lauren Patel) and handsome, monosyllabic Tony (Omar Malik) – she already presumes to be on “Ange” and “Tone” terms, as if to stake out her ownership of them. There’s also the mild-mannered divorcée Sue (Pandora Colin), the mother of the titular 15-year-old who is giving her own party. The unseen Abigail wears dungarees, has a pink streak in her hair, and seems set to bring a touch of punk to this corner of suburbia.

Angela and Tony are played by British Asian actors (adding some spice to the comment about how Tony doesn’t like Indian food), which makes Laurence’s grumbling about the changes to the neighbourhood more pointed. And Beverly (surely a future Reform voter) taking them under her wing has a touch of condescending white liberalism to it.

Peter McKintosh’s set, with its brown and orange accents and prominent bar, is ideally garish. In this new-build dreamhouse, Outhwaite brings formidable diva chops to Beverly, a narcissist who regards her home as her personal stage and treats her guests like props. A former cosmetics saleswoman who married a man with a good job and is childless by choice, she has nothing to do but tend to her appearance and sexual appeal, flirting with Tony while putting her husband down.

Beverly’s husband Laurence (Kevin Bishop) is a workaholic estate agent who wants to give the impression of being cultured, with fine art prints on the wall and leather-bound embossed editions of the works of Shakespeare and Dickens (he hasn’t read them, of course). Sue is the only born-and-bred middle-class member of the five and Beverly treats her like a child, as if to show that the tables have turned.

Despite a frenzied dance party that opens the second half, the tone remains largely on the same level throughout. A little goes a long way with this company.

Abigail's Party is at the Harold Pinter Theatre to 19 September. Book Abigail's Party tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Abigail's Party (Photos by Ellie Kurtz)