8 1GT Tuesday October 13 2020 | the times

arts

I

s this really one of the great

plays of its decade — let alone

for today — you might wonder,

as you settle down tomorrow

night to watch Abigail’s Party on

BBC Four. First staged in

London in the spring of 1977,

then co-opted that November by

the Play for Today strand on BBC One

when the pregnancy of its star Alison

Steadman made a West End transfer

unfeasible, it was watched by more

than 16 million people when repeated

in 1979. As a result, it is one of the few

stage plays of the past 50 years that

has really made it into national

consciousness. It’s being repeated as

part of the 50th-anniversary

celebrations for Play for Today,

which between 1970 and 1984 brought

130 state-of-the-nation dramas to

our front rooms.

There is no equivalent today. Some

of them were also stage hits adapted

for the small screen: Jonathan Pryce’s

star-making role in Trevor Griffiths’s

Comedians, say. Some of them were

so well loved that they were adapted

from the small screen to the stage:

Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills,

for example. One of them, John

Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey,

changed teams to ITV and became

a long-running series. Another, Alan

Bleasdale’s The Black Stuff, one of a

handful of other Plays for Today also

to be repeated by BBC Four (others

include Just a Boys’ Game, Leeds —

United!, Don’t Be Silly and A Hole in

Babylon), became a BBC series.

Abigail’s Party, though, was every

inch a one-off. As anyone knows who

has logged on to an online play this

year, stage work tends to move more

slowly than screen work. And screen

work these days tends to move faster

than it did in 1977: people have remote

controls and 540 alternatives to

choose between; directors know that

the slow simmer is likely to become

the swift channel-change. And so as

Abigail’s Party creaks into gear on a

living-room set that is a suburban

symphony of browns, it feels very

much a period piece. Steadman’s

Beverly, first seen tottering around, fag

in hand, to a Donna Summer disco

number, offers her guests cheese and

pineapple on sticks. She talks to them

like a sexed-up Reception teacher:

“Would you like a little cigarette, Sue?”

It feels sitcom-y in some of its jokes

about middle-class and lower-middle-

class living: well-spoken neighbour

Sue brings round a bottle of red wine;

Beverly promptly sticks it in the fridge.

And it is, for all its slide into

darkness, predominantly a comedy, its

social realism served lurid and

heightened. And purely technically,

just as most of us no longer share

Alison Steadman

and Tim Stern in

Abigail’s Party

Beverly and her guests’ fear of olives,

we’re also used to slicker camerawork

than this. Even Mike Leigh, who wrote

and directed the play — after lengthy

improvisations with his cast — admits

as much. “It’s very crude,” he told me

in 2012, when the stage play was last

revived in the West End. “The lighting

is terrible and all of that.”

And yet. No doubt there are other

Plays for Today that start slow and stay

slow. Stick with Abigail’s Party, though,

and you start to realise why its name

endures. Yeah, the banter between

Beverly and her estate agent husband

Laurence’s three guests is not exactly

Noël Coward. The dull Ange informs

the group of her pilchard curry recipe,

details how much they paid for their

house — £21,000, try not to cry —

and reveals that she will drink lager

and lime if she is in the pub with her

husband Tony (all glares and latent

violence in a brown suit). It’s boredom

reinvented as an art form.

Yet that’s very much the point. Stage

drama, at this time, had conditioned

us to expect delectable slivers of wit at

social gatherings (otherwise why

subject us to them?). Leigh and his

cast gave us gags about people who

don’t know how to say or do “the right

thing”. Beverly and Laurence have a

rotisserie they don’t use and a

Complete Works of Shakespeare they

don’t read. Don’t we all have our

equivalents today? Won’t our children,

and their children? Once you stop

laughing at people trapped by their

backgrounds and their era, Abigail’s

Party opens up into a takedown of

adult aspirations that will live for ever.

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?,

as Eric Berne’s hit psychology book

of the era went. Who knows? What

do you talk about to strangers? What

do you hope for? How do you want

to be seen? What does really matter to

you and how can you share it with

near-strangers?

As 15-year-old Abigail’s party down

the road gets wilder and her mother,

Sue, gets paler, the pain gets more

real and the comedy more delicious.

Beverly is a larger-than-life figure

that the exceptional Steadman

made into a modern

archetype. And if some of

its comedy of social

unease feels familiar

now, that’s because

pretty much all

subsequent social

comedy follows in its

wake. It influenced

everything from The

Office to The Royle

Family to Absolutely

Fabulous and the works

of Julia Davis (Nighty Night,

Camping). Even Stanley Kubrick

was a fan, it emerged after his death.

So if it’s slow to start, lock your

remote control away in your MFI

sideboard, fetch a hot snack from

your hostess trolley, and huge rewards

will come. The recording could be

better. The fashions and furnishings

are very Seventies. And it’s a

masterpiece for all time.

We still want to go to Abigail’s

As the BBC shows

Plays for Today,

Dominic Maxwell

explains why we’re

still laughing at

Mike Leigh’s classic

ALAMY

Four more

to watch

again

Edna, the Inebriate Woman (1971)

“I want a bed for the night.”

Suddenly it seemed as if nothing

had changed since George Orwell’s

sketches of poverty. Patricia Hayes

won a Bafta for her portrayal of an

alcoholic stumbling from one

hostel to another. Writer Jeremy

Sandford had already roused the

nation’s conscience with his 1966

drama Cathy Come Home. Edna’s

wanderings had a similar impact.

Yet Edna is no helpless victim; she

is flesh and blood. YouTube

The Fishing Party (1972)

Alan Bennett doesn’t have a

monopoly on gently humorous

studies of northern mores. Peter

Terson’s beautifully observed social

comedy about three miners on an

outing to Whitby is an example of

Play for Today in less earnest mode.

Brian Glover dominates as the

idealistic leader, desperate to prove

that it’s possible to have a good

time without being uncouth.

YouTube

Blue Remembered Hills (1979)

Once upon a time any drama

from Dennis Potter was certain to

generate “sexy shocker” headlines

in the tabloid press. True, some of

his work now looks sensationalist

or misogynistic, but the best

rewrote the grammar of television.

Blue Remembered Hills, which

borrows its title from the poet

AE Housman, is Potter’s

masterpiece. Evoking his own

wartime childhood in the Forest of

Dean, it cast adults — including

Helen Mirren and Michael Elphick

— as a band of obstreperous kids.

£1.89 on Amazon Prime

Country (1981)

The voice of Winston Churchill

rings out in the opening moments.

But this is not Churchill the

unifying wartime leader,

rather the diehard

Tory warning of the

dangers of a Labour

victory in the 1945

election. Play for

Toda y never made

a secret of its left-

wing sympathies,

so it was no surprise

to find Trevor

Griffiths dissecting the

hypocrisies of the upper

classes in Country. As Britain

emerges from the war, the members

of the Carlion family ponder their

future. The atmosphere is Chekhov

transplanted to the age of austerity.

Leo McKern, Jill Bennett and James

Fox, above, with Deborah Norton,

lead an impeccable cast. YouTube

Clive Davis

Stick with

Abigail’s

Party and

you see

why its

name

endures

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after his death

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emerges from the

Abigail’s Party is on

BBC Four tomorrow

at 9pm