Tamzin Outhwaite dazzles demonically in this pitch-perfect revival of Mike Leigh’s acid comedy of 1970s class envy and aspiration, Abigail’s Party.
The production is faithful to the text, sometimes straying slightly close to soundalikes and tics of the seminal TV version immortalised by Alison Steadman ("you know what I mean Ange!") but never overshadowed by it. Outhwaite is somehow more menacing than Steadman.
As Beverly, Outhwaite saunters through her living room, adorned with symbols of the clashes of taste between her and her neurotic estate agent husband Laurence (a hysterical, nasal Kevin Bishop), and drips poison on the "fitted carpet" as she openly and aggressively flirts with taciturn ex-footballer Tony (Omar Malik) in full view of her husband.
The comedy is always tinged with vulnerability, sadness and even a hint of violence, as tensions simmer between nurse Angela (Ashna Rabheru, who gives a subtle performance of quiet desperation) and husband Tony. Pandora Colin, as the stiffly middle-class Susan (teenage rebel Abigail's mother), just about keeps her dignity intact, besieged on all sides by peanuts, crisps, gin and tonic and revolting “pineapple hedgehogs”. Laurence's attempts at impressing Susan with the binding of his Dickens collection elicits pained indifference from Susan and gets some of the biggest laughs. Bishop is brilliant throughout.
The use of music is clever and brutal. Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby" opens the first and second acts in wildly different contexts: in the first, Outhwaite sways gently, bathed in light, as her party begins; in the second, the guests gyrate in repetitive spasms to the pulsing beat, apparently in purgatory.
Director Nadia Fall conjures plenty of withering looks timed with devastating precision. But the play isn't snide. It doesn't endorse Susan's gaze, and we see her as in some ways more pathetic than her lower-middle-class hosts. It takes a tragedy for the repressed sentiments to explode. We feel for these lost souls who would probably be having much more fun at the wild "other party", from which Patti Smith (rather than Demis Roussos) can be heard and where they are not condemned, yet, to debate house prices and the quality of the neighbourhood.