Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh at Wyndham’s, by Huntley Dent

Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh. Photo Catherine Ashmore.

Abigail’s Party
by Mike Leigh

Directed by Lindsay Posner

Jill Halfpenny – Beverly
Joe Absolom – Tony
Natalie Casey – Angela
Susannah Harker – Sue
Andy Nyman – Laurence
Wyndham’s Theatre

Gin and it.

There are cocktail parties, and then there are cocktail parties. Dramatists like to use them as a trope for the viral malaise that has infected middle-class life. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the unraveling of a marriage is x-rayed with malicious glee, while in the sedate confines of The Cocktail Party T.S. Eliot takes up his familiar, morose theme of “shoring up fragments against our ruin,” giving us hints of the Alcestis of Euripides so that the failed marriage at the heart of the play has mythic resonance. (Albee seemed to stretch for all-American resonance by naming his duelling couple George and Martha, although the relevance to George and Martha Washington never hit home for me — history is the last thing one thinks about as the air blisters and boils in the play.)

Using Woolf as his template, the young Mike Leigh took the cocktail party to absurd, vicious extremes in his 1977 play, Abigail’s Party, which was taped for television by the BBC.


Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!