Abigail’s Party

Abigail’s Party

By Mike Leigh

The Lowry, 29 April 2013

Hannah Waterman in Abigail’s Party.

Perhaps we now laugh at certain different moments, yet even so Mike Leigh’s play retains its pre-Thatcher, ‘70s splendour.

This nouveau riche couple Beverly (Hannah Waterman) and Laurence (Martin Marquez), an unhappy mismatch, invite a few neighbours around for drinks and nibbles.  There are plenty of laughs and superior sniggers to be had, but it never becomes quite as savage as Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The characters are well-sculptured monsters, skirting though never quite succumbing to caricature, and the play says much about Britain still: its snobbishness and pretension, the incessant bullying and sense of frustration, our essential immaturity.

I enjoyed this production very much.  The performances, particularly from Hannah Waterman as Beverly, are excellent, and as for the  set, a ‘70s-style living room, it is virtually a character in itself.

Abigail’s Party is at The Lowry until 4 May, further details are here.

Another Year by Mike Leigh

Another Year
Directed by Mike Leigh
UK, 2010
Cornerhouse, 7 November 2010

Still from Another Year

Mike Leigh’s latest film is, as per usual some may say, a closely observed social comedy.

Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) live a comfortable, some may say cartoonish, middle-class existence but some of their friends, notably Mary (Lesley Manville), are rather more desperate.

There’s an unsparing quality to Leigh’s work which I admire, an unwillingness to sugar-coat social realities or to be deceived about them.  It gives rise often to a subtle cruelty, a disdain, when people meet and speak to each other.

In ‘Gooseberries’ Chekhov writes of the invisibility of the sad and the stricken; those who live more comfortable existences, such as Tom and Gerri here, simply do not notice them.  Or, if they do, they see them simply as a nuisance.  It is a charge one could never place at the director’s door.

If there is one point that I’d level at Leigh (and I’m not sure really whether it’s a criticism: you could say the same thing about Woody Allen, say, or a slue of other directors) it is that he has a tendency to recycle his characters.  Katie in this film (Karina Fernandez) is Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky, while as for Mary we’ve seen her many times before.  She is the guest that you cannot get rid of.

Nonetheless this is a very special film, a distillation almost of all that’s good about Leigh.  There’s a stirling cast and plenty of fine performances.