70s suburban nightmare

A play written in the days when dressing as a punk was outrageous and being a divorcee was a big deal is still going strong. NIGEL GEARING talks to the director of 'Abigail's Party'


Director Maggie Tarver hits the volume switch and the soulful sounds of the late Barry White fill the rehearsal space. She wiggles her hips in appreciation, then retreats.

Sexual politics are in the air. A slightly tarty, common woman has organised a do for a few people in the street. Hubby enters. She's already chain fagging away and plying herself with gin. He's forgotten to pick up the license order, has urgent calls to make, will have to leave again. She's whining from the lounge. The new neighbours are a sight to behold, she a twittering bundle of nervous neurosis, he, the brooding, quiet type.

Add to the mix another uptight suburbanite, recently divorced, turn the lounge into the set, shove the clock back 30 years, and welcome to Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party.

Tarver remembers Abigail's Party from the early 80s, when she played Angela, the uptight neighbour's wife at an amateur theatre company in Birmingham.

And while Leigh's play came about as an improvised workshop piece, Tarver was surprised when she went looking on the net for plays with strong female characters to find it was still being played at London's West End all these years later. "It was actually on at three or four theatres on the fringe."

But her decision for it to be the Other Theatre Company's first piece was based on a knock on her door late in 2002 by two students who were soon to graduate from her one-year intensive acting course at South Seas Film and Television School. They wanted to carry on working with her.

One was Bernadette Brewer, who plays Beverly, the self-obsessed drunken lush, three years into an already strained marriage to the dull real estate agent Laurence, played by Keir Robertson.

To add to the suburban nightmare, toss in the brooding computer operator Tony (Shaun Thompson), for whom Beverly quickly develops the hots, and his irritating wife Angela, played by Caitlin Bossley. Linda Johns plays Sue, another neighbour who joins the team for a social night in as daughter Abigail holds a party at her house where, among other horrors, a Capri carrying two coloured 20-year-old men is observed pulling up by her fellow guests.

So the stage is set to return to North London in 1977 when dressing as a punk was outrageous, and being a divorcee was still a big deal - blame it on feminism. Realising that Abigail's Party would never translate directly to 2004, Tarver changed none of the dialogue.

"Many of the issues couldn't be updated," she says. "It makes you realise how far society has changed."

With the success of Mamma Mia!, a revamped Ladies Night and eighties hit Wild Cabbage playing at SiLo, what is it about this wave of theatre luring the baby boomers?

"We want those who remember it the first time to see it again, but this trend of the 70s being in with a younger generation works in our favour," Tarver says. "And a really great play stands out. It emerges when you start working on it. This one is a gem. It is just so well written."

Tarver moved to New Zealand in 1989 from her native England where she had gained considerable acting experience. Since 1990 she has been the main tutor of on-screen acting at the South Seas Film and Television School in Glenfield.

The Other Theatre Company first took Abigail's Party to the Belmont Rose Theatre on the North Shore last May.

Productions scheduled for this year by its team of actors and directors include Robert Harding's Steel Magnolias, Quills by Doug Wright and Year of Grants by Wellington playwright Gabe McDonnell.


* What: Abigail's Party

* Where and when: Maidment Studio, March 10-27, 7.30pm