Mike Leigh's most famous dark comedy may be pushing fifty, but it still proves itself as a box office draw, helped, I'm sure, by a few recognisable faces from the TV in Natalie Abrahami's revival for the Royal Exchange with its setting neatly translated from Essex to somewhere in Manchester.
The audience enters to designer Peter Butler's rather cluttered combined living room, toilet and kitchen set—although the director says in the programme that they pared it back—that certainly suggests the '70s with its predominance of oranges and browns and the leather upholstery, as does Kym Marsh's Beverly in her fabulous dress, who, with her northern accent, reminds me even more of a friend of my mum who hosted Tupperware parties around this time.
Beverly is hosting a party for the neighbours, enabling Susan (a beautifully restrained Tupele Dorgu) to get out of her own house while her 15-year-old daughter, Abigail—whom we never see—is left to have a party of her own. Also invited are new arrivals to the neighbourhood Angela (Yasmin Taheri), a young nurse who looks up to Beverly, and her husband Tony (Kyle Rowe), a man of few syllables who has the appearance of a bulldog and, in response to most questions, barks a sharp, decisive "yes" or "no" without elaboration. There is a suggestion of controlling behaviour in their marriage, but this isn't developed.
Completing the party is Beverly's husband, Laurence (Graeme Hawley), who works long hours as an estate agent and even has to nip out during the party to see a client. Laurence has pretensions about artistic appreciation, talking with Susan, whom he sees as more sophisticated, about paintings and classical music, but his wife shouts him down and tells him no one wants to talk about these things. When he wants to play James Galway, she forces him to put on José Feliciano then later moves onto—famously—Demis Roussos, while he calls the picture she likes "pornography" and refuses to put it up downstairs. As the alcohol flows, the arguments increase, while Susan worries about what is happening at the teenage party in her own house over the road.
While this was once a satire on a culture clash between those from working class backgrounds moving up the social scale and their new middle class neighbourhoods—Beverly is convinced she knows what good taste is and that her husband, who just spouts facts about art without any real insight, is wrong, and middle-class Susan is too polite to correct either of them, but her hesitations and facial expressions say it all—it is now a period piece about the 1970s, gently mocking the aesthetics and attitudes of the time.
There are plenty of funny lines that still work, and the cast draw draw these cartoonish but almost believable characters well, but Abrahami's production still felt rather flat to me, with little variation in pace until the sudden, tragic climax, where the whole stage is made to spin rapidly to emphasise the change, followed by a conclusion that seemed a bit messy and uncertain. This makes it feel like a lot of talk which is often entertaining but it is easy for your mind to wander, and when it wanders back you don't feel like you've missed anything.
But even five decades on, this 1977 comedy still has plenty to amuse and entertain modern audiences, as this production shows.