Teenage parties can be bad for you

ABIGAIL’S PARTY, Lowry, Salford

IT makes you wonder what Mike Leigh’s comedy would have been like if Sue, mother of the 15-year-old, never-seen party hostess Abigail, had just told her daughter no and stayed at home for the night.

For it is the presence of the middle-class divorced architect’s wife (Emily Raymond), slumming it with neighbours Beverly (Hannah Waterman) and Laurence (Martin Marquez), Angie (Katie Lightfoot) and Tony (Samuel James), who inadvertently puts the patronising tone of hostess Beverly into overdrive and provides the catalyst for the combustion chamber that is the latter’s big mouth.

Mike Leigh’s famously semi-improvised comedy has done the rounds a few times in the past decade, but never quite so overbearingly in-their-faces as here.

Make-up demonstrator Beverly and estate agent Laurence have deeply nasal, estuary accents, as do nurse Angie and slack-jawed husband Tony, a former pro footballer. It’s like an episode of “The Only Way is Essex”, and just as pointless, but louder.

The performers are loud even without amplification, and I’m not sure acting is the right word for the declamatory style they adopt; they come across like this is Abigail’s Party: the Cartoon.

Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: my argument with the show has always been that for all its classic status, supposed realism and social accuracy, the characters are stereotypes of the most obvious kind. So a speak-up-and-shout-to-your-neighbour performance style doesn’t mean all that much — except it can be tiring to listen to, so goodness knows how hard it must be to do.

As plays go, this is actually a pretty average one: there’s a party, it degenerates into sniping, then open hostility, then Beverly making a fool of Laurence with Tony . . . and Tony making a fool of himself. Not a lot happens, storywise.

But the beauty of the evening is in the sniping and back-biting, in Beverly’s monstrous self-obsession with the hostess role and in the desperate attempt by the others to get out alive.

This, of course, is true of all of them but one — which just goes to show that teenage parties really can be bad for you.