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Steve Dineen, Anna Kirke, Jamie
Matthewman, Alice Selwyn and Amy Starling. |
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Everyman Palace Theatre Cork, Corn Exchange Newbury, Coventry Belgrade Theatre, Harrogate
Theatre, Palace Theatre Mansfield, Wakefield Theatre Royal,
Norwich Playhouse, Brewhouse Theatre Taunton and Haymarket
Theatre Basingstoke. |
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COLETTE SHERIDAN - IRISH EXAMINER **** |
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"Mike Leigh’s best-known play is a real
crowd-puller and this touring production from London Classic
Theatre is a tour de force. The strongest character in this
play, set at a 1970s British suburban drinks party, is the
domineering and hugely irritating Beverly, excellently played by
Alice Selwyn. She completely takes over the stage from the
opening scene.
This is very much a play about class, snobbery and the reality
of getting on with life in dysfunctional marriages. Laurence,
Beverly’s husband is totally stressed out in his job as an
estate agent. His hectoring wife doesn’t help his situation. She
has invited new neighbours, Angela and Tony, for drinks, as well
as Sue, a prim, put-upon abandoned wife whose daughter, Abigail,
is throwing a wild party in her mother’s house, next door to
Beverly and Laurence. The audience never sees the 15-year-old
Abigail, but the parallel parties serve to underscore just how
little the adults have grown since their own teenage years.
Abigail’s Party has less to do with plot and more to do with
portraying five credible characters and their responses to far
too much alcohol and ensuing sexual tension. It can only end in
tears."
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MARY LELAND - IRISH TIMES |
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"Class warfare in the drawing room is never a pretty sight, but
playwright Mike Leigh rarely indulges in charm. The uneasiness
associated with Abigail’s Party, one of his best-known plays, is
that the audience is complicit in his assault on the bourgeoisie
- to which, by and large, the audience itself -belongs.
The theme is a simple: a small group of people bound by a
spurious intimacy come together for an evening of drinks and
“cheesy bits”, with the emphasis on the drinks. The hostess is a
terrifyingly self-confident woman who puts the Beaujolais in the
fridge, for whom dinner is a warmed-over pizza, and who is
psychologically (even psychotically) incapable of taking no for
an answer.
The plot is almost entirely conversational, although it is a
conversation that reveals character and circumstances with a
chilling, if comic, reality. Leigh’s skill in this, of course,
is that he allows just enough good nature to shine through to
reduce the monstrosity of these all-too-credible people.
But Leigh isn’t Edward Albee; there’s no intention here to “get
the guests”, and without any such intense dramatic charge the
play is carried on the assured performances of Alice Selwyn,
Steve Dineen, Amy Starling, Jamie Matthewman and Anna Kirke.
Directed by Michael Cabot for London Classic Theatre, with a
crowded set from Geraldine Bunzl, Abigail’s Party succeeds in
what it was meant to do - to make us laugh, as well as sneer, at
ourselves, especially as there seemed to be as much drinking in
the auditorium as there was on stage."
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LIAM HEYLIN - CORK EVENING ECHO |
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"Mike Leigh’s 1970s
play is a nauseatingly funny work that picks away at the English
class system for a couple of hours - to devastating effect.
There are times when the cringe factor is so high it is
difficult to watch and harder still to sit there waiting for the
next crushingly awful exchange between the characters.
London Classic Theatre have brought a terrific production of
this play - a regular in the canon of modern British theatre -
to Cork, where it is hardly ever seen. Alice Selwyn, as the
hostess with the mostest, invites a few neighbours around to her
house to patronise and schmooze them. It is a thrilling
performance from Selwyn. Flouncing around the stage in her
over-the-top dress and hair do, she beckons her suburban guests
through her home like she is offering them unimagined palatial
pleasures.
It is worth seeing the play just to see her grandly and
repeatedly invite them to “Come through!” - even if they’re only
going to the peanut bowl in the kitchen.
Director Michael Cabot has put together a nicely judged
production which boasts a fantastic first act as the social pot
simmers and bubbles. The play is less satisfying as it boils
over in the second act but nonetheless it is a very good night
of theatre.
So many kitsch cornerstones of Seventies culture are visible
from the first moments. Of course it is at its heart a
profoundly depressing play - but it is queasily and undeniably
funny."
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LIAM MURPHY -
MUNSTER EXPRESS ONLINE |
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"London Classic Theatre
returned to Waterford, but to Garter Lane this time, with a
glorious presentation of Mick Leigh’s famous 1977 hit,
Abigail’s Party. The original was justly famous for its
relentless and comic savaging of social class structures
through the chattering class vehicle of a dinner party with drinkies and nibbles rather than a sit-down disembowelling
of social values.
Remarkably the play has
hardly aged any, the social targets are still there and the
knowing laughter of a full house showed just how accurate
the lampoon is. You had no bother accepting a house going
for 21,000 as against 22,000 asking price, even in a nice
area that was opening up to the wrong sort of upwardly
mobile self-improver. There was Laurence, the real estate
agent, and his horrible monster of a social bully Bev, who
invite new neighbours Ange (nurse Angela) and her computer
operator husband, Tone (or Tony) as well as longer time
resident Sue, whose daughter, the unseen Abigail, is having
her first teenage party.
The set by Geraldine
Bunzl was a marvel of accuracy with record players, Van Gogh
reproductions, a Lowry print and a blue lava lamp. The
perfume was Estee Lauder and the music was Jose Feliciano,
Elvis and Crazy Love. The nibbles were cheese ‘n’
pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks, nuts and crisps.
During the first half
the various tensions and social mistakes pop out and by Act
Two you could cut the sexual tension with a steak knife as
the boozy Bev set about the slow-dance seduction of Tone
with Ange a willing onlooker. The sense of expectation has
drained away into petulance, bullying, disappointment and
liberal doses of booze and fags.
This was an excellent
cast and Alice Selwyn as Bev caught expertly the desperation
and monstrous behaviour of a character likened to Hedda
Gabler or Lady Macbeth. Amy Starling as Angela caught the
mouse and the realist very well. Jamie Matthewman was a
brooding Tony who was one sort at the party and another at
home. Steve Dineen caught, so well, the complex social
climber Laurence, who was also disappointed in his chosen
mate, Bev. His edgy stressful character was well explored
and Anna Kirke as Susan provided the clash of cultures and
expectations.
Michael Cabot directed
with style and feeling for the time and I hope he continues
to include Waterford in his touring plans."
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JOANNE MACE -
BASINGSTOKE GAZETTE
***** |
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"It’s perhaps no
surprise that this production of Abigail's Party is such a
finely tuned and well-oiled machine.
After all, these are
the final performances of London Classic Theatre's 2008 tour
of Mike Leigh's 1977 play, so the actors have inhabited
these characters for five months or so. And Steve Dineen has
been poor old Laurence since last September.
It's a wonderful
trip down memory lane for those who were there first time
round, and as much of an entertainment for those who missed
it all. The glorious set provided much entertainment pre
curtain-up, as giggles of recognition were heard around the
auditorium. Having been born in the glorious 1970s, I was
able to look, laugh and blame my parents, recognising
several pieces of furniture which took pride of place in our
family home - although not the hideous art, thank goodness -
and get the joke about holidays in Palma Nova.
As most people know,
Abigail's Party is about many things, most notably the
subject which remains to this day an elephant in the room,
class. But, thirty one years later, it's still a
coruscating, relevant satire. Anxious party host Beverly,
who invites her neighbours round to impress and interrogate
them, is the embodiment of many modern anxieties.
We could see how the
work deliberates on age, different generations, anyone who's
ever pretended to be someone they're not, one-upmanship, an
Englishman's home, and so much else, thanks to the really
superb cast of five.
Alison Steadman's
Beverly long ago entered the national consciousness, but the
elegant Alice Selwyn has more than made Bev her own. Her
good looks added an extra frisson to her raunchy flirting
with her friend Ange's (Amy Starling) near-monosyllabic
husband Tony (Jamie Matthewman), all in front of her own
husband, Laurence, and she was perfectly overbearing
throughout.
Starling was
wonderful, just hilarious. Her posture garnered laughs all
on its own, as did that of Anna Kirke as poor middle class
Susan, whose rebellious daughter was holding the titular
gathering in a house down the road. Kirke's portrayal was a
triumph, too, brittle, delicate, and desperately empathetic.
As the simmering
tension and hostility gave way to fireworks in Act Two, and
everything came crashing down, we were all thoroughly
delighted to have spent a few hours in the company of such
talented individuals, breathing new life into such an
important twentieth century work."
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