Writer: Mike Leigh
Director: Pravesh Kumar
Do you like pilchard curry? If the thought makes you chuckle through a little queasiness, this production of perhaps the 1970s’ defining comedy of manners may be just the right dish. Five suburbanites – too old for the real party being held by teenage Abigail – find their own fun in cheese ‘n’ pineapple, chilled Beaujolais and barely concealed social and marital tensions.
Eager to impress their neighbours, up and coming Beverley and Lawrence host Tony and Angela one Friday night. Sue, better off and better educated but divorced, feels obliged to join them while her 15-year-old daughter conducts a party at her house, audible nearby. What follows is two hours of cringing discomfort, much of it hilarious.
The flat back wall of the set looks as if MFI has been commissioned to advertise the hosts’ aspirations in modules – from Van Gogh to fibre lamps to cabinets of booze brought back from Spanish holidays – all concentrated into a too wide, too tall tower of walnut brown MDF. The resulting shallow stage puts the focus firmly on the five performers – and it’s all the better for that. The costume designers have had their fun too in recreating the 70s. Angela (Victoria Brazier) sports Day-glo green, softened only by the glimpse of her slip when gin frees her from gawky politeness to reckless, shameless dancing. Lawrence (Orlando Wells) is a vision of conforming dullness: his colourless suit seems kept upright by the grim determination of his grey moustache and brown tie. Tony (Max Gell) appears so bland and neutral that it comes as a genuine shock when suppressed anger finally bursts from his roll-necked throat.
Beverly‘s dress is a rather wonderful meeting of banality and sensuality, a floaty leopardskin fabric, spray-painted in red. And, while Angela‘s performance stands out – a compelling combination of the put-upon and the quietly subversive – this play relies on a strong Beverly. She’s the kind of domestic monster who is a gift for a comic actor. But this can be a danger too. As Mike Leigh has said, the play ‘is obviously sympathetic to all the characters, whatever their foibles, not least Beverly. And if it works, it does so precisely because the audience experiences them in a real, three-dimensional way.’
Gratifyingly, Goldy Notay’s portrayal of Beverly has just enough touching moments to ground her in our sympathies: despite her irritation with her husband, there is a catch in her voice early on, as she warns him that overwork will give him a heart attack. There is a joyful innocence even in her drinking to excess and a delight in her favourite songs (by Elvis and José Feliciano, as originally intended, and not Demis Roussos as in the TV version). Of course it is Beverly’s turbocharged desire to affirm how thoroughly she has arrived as a social success that drives the performance, a performance that respectfully acknowledges the original by Alison Steadman (then Mike Leigh’s wife) but which may owe more to Catherine Tate in the vocal antics of her farcical insistence that every guest must enjoy every aspect of the party, even if that means smoking a cigarette while scoffing three kinds of savoury snack.
Director Pravesh Kumar’s commitment to diversity helps to stop us making too much of the inevitable comparison with the all-white original Play for Today: Indian audiences will recognise and enjoy the comic stereotype of this Beverly, while Tina Chiang, as the long-suffering Sue, bears the casual racism of her neighbour Tony with dignified, stony-faced stoicism.
This is no simple rib-tickler, more a tragi-comedy for the British. In playing for laughs, it is smoothly successful: every line and every gesture is perfectly judged. Whether the most demanding scene of the play works quite as fully – a climax in which the audience shouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry – is, like chilled Beaujolais maybe, a matter of taste.
Runs until 2 April 2022
