Last Updated on August 20, 2026
It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To
5.0 out of 5.0 stars
Last night saw the opening of Abigail’s Party, Mike Leigh’s classic 1970s play, also adapted for TV, that made a star out of the wonderful Alison Steadman in the role of monstrous suburban wife Beverly. This 2024 Stratford East production has returned to London after a successful tour and stars real-life Essex girl Tamzin Outhwaite in the leading role. The play is a tragi-comedy of manners that lampoons the aspirational lower middle class and is as acute a reading of the British class system as anything by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward or Terence Rattigan.
Estate agent Laurence and his wife Beverly have invited near neighbours Angela and Tony, a South Asian couple who have just recently moved in for a drinks party. Angela is a nurse, and Tony is a computer operative. Also invited is Sue, a divorcee who lives next door. Sue’s teenage daughter Abigail is having a party which is a constant source of curiosity, tension and disturbance for the adults. Underneath the attempt to achieve a veneer of social respectability, the writing creates a simmering cauldron of discontent with undercurrents of racism, class snobbery and sexual and marital conflict waiting to boil over.
The set and costume design by Peter McKintosh is acutely attuned to the period. We are in the living room of an Essex 1970s semi-detached property. Laurence is interested in showing off his cultural sophistication. There is an unread gold-embossed collected edition of Charles Dickens’ works. L.S.Lowry and Van Gogh reproductions sit on the wall; he proudly announces at one point that Lowry’s father was, like him, an estate agent. A James Galway album sits by the stereo.
Wife Beverly doesn’t share Laurence’s tastes. She is a fan of Demis Roussos and rhapsodises about her new dining room suite and a cheap soft porn painting that Laurence has banished to the bedroom. The décor is very familiar to those of us who lived through the 1970s. There is G-Plan furniture and orange patterned wallpaper that evokes a period when people got married too young, the relationships then pulled apart by the sexual revolution sweeping the West.
Tamzin Outhwaite stars as Beverly; she is libidinous, bullying and narcissistic with a Farrah Fawcett flick. Outhwaite dominates the stage with her hair, a floaty orange rayon dress and gold stack heels being the focal point of the play. It is a bravura performance delivered in Estuary English. With Outhwaite’s rangy frame, she can pull off disco poses and moves that articulate her dominance of the space and much like Rosamund Pike in Inter Alia, it is as much a physical performance as verbal. Her husband is constantly belittled, the female neighbours patronised, and it is only ex-footballer Tony, the strong, silent type who she regards as sexual prey, who is not intimidated by her.
Kevin Bishop as upwardly mobile Laurence gives us a masterclass in humiliation. Dressed in a two-piece Burton suit and driving a Mini, his only redeeming feature according to Beverley is that he is ‘good with money.’ Bishop squirms his way through the role, demeaned by his wife, jealous of Tony’s macho confidence and failing to inhabit the middle-class mores that he aspires to. Even his anger is impotent; he pulls a knife on Beverley at one point, who dismisses him with disdain.
The moral centre of the play is Pandora Colin’s Sue, a painfully shy and polite, sherry-drinking middle-class liberal in sensible shoes and a salmon-pink waistcoat. Force-fed G&Ts by Beverley, she ends up vomiting, a fitting response to the degrading behaviour of her hosts. She dismisses Laurence’s attempts at achieving a racist alliance and even confronts Beverley as her behaviour becomes more extreme. It’s a pitch-perfect performance.
Omar Malik as Tony says little, but with his wide-lapelled shirt has a Travolta-esque sense of physicality and control that Beverley can’t resist. He returns from a visit next door to check upon the unseen Abigail’s party with his shirt wet and rumpled, his credentials as a stud further reinforced.
Lauren Patel as his wife Angela delivers her role in a deliberately annoying baby’s whine. As a couple, they are as unsuited to each other as Laurence and Beverly. Angela is Beverly’s willing acolyte, impressed by her material wealth and matching her drink for drink, but also turns against her mentor as the walls come tumbling down. Patel’s transformation from oppressed mouse to confident and compassionate professional was impressive.
Much comedy is just tragedy in disguise. Abigail’s Party has an ending that held me riveted for the final twenty minutes as all the social niceties collapse around the protagonists. Dysfunction breeds dysfunction and the pain and anger we bestow on others has consequences. Nadia Fall’s production opens up that dark underbelly of pain and is a dramatic triumph.
The Harold Pinter Theatre
Panton Street, London, SW1Y 4DN
Wed 12 Aug – Sat 19 Sep 2026
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