Abigail's Party had a lot to live up to. I'd heard many people praise the production, and the DVD cover says that it was voted number 11 in the BFI's all-time top 100 British TV programmes. I also went into it thinking that Alison Steadman was the titular Abigail. I'm pleased to say that Abigail's Party lives up to the hype. And Alison Steadman plays Beverley - Abigail is a never-seen character whose teenage party forms part of the reason the 5 characters get together at Beverley's house.
Alison Steadman is remarkable as Beverley - a woman who is desperate to appear refined and fantastically middle class. She put us in mind of Steadman's much later character, Pamela, in Gavin & Stacey, another woman struggling with middle-class angst, and I wouldn't be surprised if the parallels were intentional. Janine Duvitski plays Angela, one of Beverley and Laurence's new neighbours, and she's a riot. Always excellent in One Foot in the Grave, Waiting For God and others, Duvitski is fantastic at playing the slightly dippy naïf. I enjoyed Harriet Reynold's (an actress previously unknown to me) uncomfortable turn as the more upper-class mother of Abigail who watches events unfold at this 'cocktail party from hell' with haughty detachment.
By turns hilarious, cringe-making and shocking - the ending surprised me - the TV play leaves a lot unrevealed, but shows a lot about the middle classes in 1970's Britain (I assume, I wasn't there at the time!).
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