“We all know a Beverley,” said Nancy Durrant in The Times. The “magnificent monster” at the heart of Mike Leigh’s “savage 1970s satire of the aspirational middle classes” has “never gone away”.
More than four decades since Abigail’s Party premiered at Hampstead Theatre, Nadia Fall’s revival of the hit play has opened at Stratford East. Taking on the role of Beverley is a “mesmerising” Tamzin Outhwaite, who is hosting a dinner party alongside her estate agent husband Laurence (Kevin Bishop) to welcome their new “younger, less wealthy” neighbours, Angela and Tony, to the area. Really it’s an opportunity for the older couple to flaunt their bigger house – a “glorious orange riot” designed by Peter McKintosh.
Also in attendance at the “brittle little do” is Beverley’s divorced neighbour Sue (the “wonderfully subtle” Pandora Colin), whose teenage daughter Abigail is holding a punk-soundtracked house party within earshot.
Fall has “hardly tweaked” the production, except for casting two British Asian actors in the roles of Angela and Tony: a “brilliant touch” that adds another layer to Laurence’s “snide” comments about the area becoming more “cosmopolitan”.
Presiding over the “soiree from hell”, Outhwaite puts her “own stamp” on the lead role, expertly moving between “marital carping, proprietorial fussing and predatory manoeuvring”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. Throughout the “superbly acted” production, “not a beat or look is misjudged”. At its “vicious best”, the show feels like “pre-Thatcher England’s answer to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
It’s not without “flaws”, though, said Theo Bosanquet in What’s On Stage. The ending fails to “live up to the promise of what precedes it”, and some parts of the script felt dated, “not least the use of the word ‘rape’ for cheap laughs”. But Fall’s revival “revels in its sheer entertainment factor”, and Outhwaite is on “stellar form” as the comic lead.
Many of the lines are “gaspingly, immortally funny”, added Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out, and as a “simmering study of passive-aggressive Britishness it is utterly peerless”.
Until 12 October, Stratford East, London E15