Abigail's Party at Maidment Studio

By FRANCIS TILL

A comedy of suburban manners, Abigail's Party was an assault by caricature on the pretentious, unhappy and doomed lower-middle-classes of England when it was written in 1977.

This production, realising Mike Leigh's material must be taken as it was written rather than "updated", is honest to the script. The downside of that is how aware the audience becomes that these people are past caricature: they have no real living counterparts.

If you didn't know them then you might wonder why anyone would invent them now, purely for the purpose of ridicule.

And ridicule it is, without much sympathy to lift the mix. But the nostalgia, for those who were there (or those who aspire to retro and wish to glean some incomparable period details for contemporary use), is acute and more worthwhile than most.

From the books on the wall (in sets, real leather, gold lettering on the covers) to the clothes on the backs, this is real vintage.

The unseen Abigail is the wave of the future, a 15-year-old girl having a rather loud party just outside the doors of a room in which five curiously unsettled souls conspire to enjoy a rather pale form of life.

She is Sex Pistols, they are almost anything but. Abigail is the daughter of fifth wheel divorcee Sue (Linda Johns) who points up the emptiness in store.

Around her are two couples, the hosts Beverly (Bernadette Brewer) and Laurence (Keir Robertson) and their new neighbours Angela (Caitlin Bossley) and Tony (Shaun Thompson).

Beverly is the voluble centre of the play and Brewer plays her to a perfect, engagingly obnoxious, tawdry treat.

She wants more life, more sex, more anything, really, than her harried little husband, all in browns, seems able to provide.

Angela is Beverly's foil, a nurse with secret longings for at least a bit of autonomy, and Tony, a taciturn ex-footballer, is "life" to Laurence's rather dramatically written "death".

The women here give particularly strong performances and Bossley moves about the stage with a fluidity and grace that sing a virtual aria about her secret inner life.