We had no internet back in the mid 1980s, you will be shocked to hear, and so many of the things that happened there had to go on in other venues, albeit at a slightly slower pace. The slightly-too-intense discussion of topics of marginal interest to most people, for instance, was mostly relocated to the letters pages of magazines aimed at niche audiences. I was, you may also be shocked to hear, a bit too young to fully grasp all the ins and outs of the debates that raged across these well-thumbed pages, but one allusion that stayed with me came as part of an argument about excessive naturalism in British sci-fi TV: it suggested an upcoming scene would depict one character showing another his flashy new ray gun, but admitting that it wasn’t actually any good for zapping people with.
I didn’t get the allusion at the time, but the fact it was written and published indicates more than one person thought that many would, which tells you something about the cultural impact of its source: which is the play Abigail’s Party, originally broadcast on TV in November 1977 as part of the BBC’s Play for Today strand. One of the great things about life in the seventies, I expect, was the fact that there were only three TV channels (two BBC and the commercial ITV network), and so you could put on serious single plays every week and still be guaranteed a decent-sized audience (whereas the multi-channel world where ratings are god has resulted in the thin gruel of celebrity-led documentaries, reality shows, and lifestyle programming which makes up the majority of BBC 1’s primetime output these days).
Play for Today has a possibly undeserved reputation for being the home of dour, realist, lefty slice-of-life agitprop – this is the strand that produced the charming SF romance The Flipside of Dominick Hyde, the disturbing morality play Brimstone and Treacle, and the very nearly indescribable Penda’s Fen – but it is true that lefty troublemakers turned beloved national treasures Ken Loach and Mike Leigh both did early work in this strand. Abigail’s Party was derived from a stage play which opened earlier in 1977, directed by Leigh. It’s one of the most famous products of the Renowned Mike Leigh Near-Mystical Semi-Improvisatory Method, and for this reason it’s a rare example of a play without a conventional author – Leigh is credited as deviser and director.
For a play (or filmed play) which has entered the annals of TV legend and popped up near the top of lists of the best British TV programmes ever… well, retune your expectations to 1977 settings, maybe, as it is basically concerned with five people sitting in the same room. The room is the home of middle-class class couple Beverly (Alison Steadman) and Laurence (Tim Stern); she is a former beautician, he an estate agent. Largely, one suspects, at Beverly’s insistence, they are hosting a drinks party with their new neighbours Angela (Janine Duvitski) and Tony (John Salthouse), along with Sue (Harriet Reynolds), a divorced woman who also lives close by. Whither Abigail? I’m glad you asked: she is Sue’s teenage daughter, who is holding her first proper party concurrently with the events of the play, and one gets the distinct impression that Sue is only here because she has agreed to leave the house during the party and has nowhere else to go.
The decor is hideous and the party itself quite excruciating to watch: Beverly forces drinks on all the guests, shows off the house she seems inordinately proud of – ‘this is our downstairs toilet,’ she informs a guest at one point, clearly believing that having two bogs is a status symbol – and generally belittling Laurence. Laurence spends most of the play getting increasingly stressed. Tony is surly and uncommunicative. Angela seems quite happy to go along with Beverly in a thoughtless sort of way. Sue, whose speech suggests she is from a slightly higher social stratum than the others, mostly just sits there watching the others in a sort of clenched horror, like a human being forced to attend a chimps’ tea party.
On one level the play is really about class and especially social climbing: one of the sociological changes in progress in the UK in the post-war decades, until at least the 1980s, was an expansion in the middle class – or at least a significant blurring of the line between the working and middle classes. Sue shows every sign of being genuinely middle class, maybe even upper middle class; the others are a few rungs below her. (Yes, foreign readers, these things really do make a difference in Britain, even today.) Beverly and Laurence both seem to be ferocious social climbers, although for them this takes the form of acquiring all the trappings of the middle class, regardless of whether they completely understand them – hence Laurence’s purchase of a set of leather-bound Shakespeare volumes, just for appearance’s sake (they are, he admits, ‘no good for reading’) and Beverly’s desire to appear sophisticated by buying tacky ‘erotic’ prints. One of the drivers of the play, though, is that they don’t really agree as to what form this advancement should take – for Beverly it is aesthetic, all about appearing to do the right thing, while Laurence aspires to appear intellectual – buying Shakespeare and ‘classical’ music by James Galway.
This is a comedy, and a rather dark one, and it’s hard to completely disagree with the playwright Dennis Potter, who reviewed it on its original broadcast and found it to be one long protracted jeer at an entire class of people. The play is certainly still funny – and cringeworthy – but if Leigh and the actors are attempting to make a wider point beyond the suggestion that people who don’t know their social station will end up looking stupid and crass, it’s hard to see what it is.
There is something else going on here, though, for this is a play about characters as well as ideas. Alison Steadman’s turn as the overbearing, awful Beverly effectively launched her career as a major actress – it is really a grotesque performance, but a brilliantly-sustained one and not without nuance. She dominates the party and the play, a study in self-satisfaction, ego, and casual cruelty. What did surprise me about Abigail’s Party is the sustained note of nastiness throughout it, and also an undertone of barely-controlled repressed violence: Beverly is passive-aggressively horrible to everyone but Tony, whom she flirts with outrageously, while the characters jokily talk about rape and domestic violence. You almost get the sense the evening can end in only two possible ways: either in a fistfight or wife-swapping. The fact that it does neither is a bit of a left turn that sends the play off on a different trajectory, perhaps attempting to inject a bit of pathos that for me didn’t quite work.
Apparently Abigail’s Party is the one item on Mike Leigh’s CV that he’s embarrassed about, feeling that while the play itself is fine, the conversion from stage to TV was ‘appalling’. I don’t think it’s as bad as all that, by any means – although it obviously struggles to meet the expectations generated by its reputation and place in the culture. The characters are well-drawn, the acting is excellent, and the depiction of a certain section of society is almost forensic. It’s still enjoyable today, as well as – perhaps – an interesting piece of cultural history, and a reminder of just how hideous everything looked in the 1970s.