It’s a bravura performance from the very beginning, when Robyn Malcolm as middle-aged teacher Penny Wilding delivers an impromptu lecture – warm, wise, compassionate and shorn of euphemisms – to her students after one is caught watching pornography on his phone. There are protocols for this sort of thing, her headteacher has informed her, but it’s quicker and more effective to do it her way.
After the Party explores what happens when an unstoppable force meets an amorphous, ungraspable object. Five years ago, Penny witnessed – or believes she witnessed – her husband Phil (Peter Mullan) engaging in a sex crime at his birthday party with a drunken underage friend of their daughter, Grace (Tara Canton), and confronted him furiously in front of their guests. As the scene unfolds in flashbacks from different points of view over six episodes, we see Phil reacting with the outraged innocence of – well, the innocent. Or is it the well-honed performance of a practised predator? Mullan, with his ability to suggest inescapable menace lurking beneath everyman bonhomie, is perfect casting.
Most of the guests – and then, as word spreads, most of their small town in Wellington, New Zealand – don’t believe Penny. Or don’t want to believe her. Or choose not to. The levels of denial people can sustain, along with the fight between moral courage and cowardice, and how hated the former can make you, are two of the major themes of this dark, provocative drama.
Despite the support or studied neutrality of most of their friends and neighbours, Phil finds the doubt and suspicion unbearable and leaves town. Now he is back, as if nothing had happened – with most people extending an unfettered welcome. Penny’s rage and apparent impotence fuel an escalating series of impulsive decisions, from taking on the local fishermen working illegally in protected waters to contacting people at Phil’s new school, where he is a sports coach and organises all the student trips away, to inform them of the allegations against him. Her increasingly extreme behaviour alienates more and more people – including Grace, who has always believed her father – and isolation means Penny soon has even fewer tosses to give. And she did not start with many.
Like Mare of Easttown or Happy Valley, After the Party is built round a middle-aged female character who has seen too much of life not to know precisely how awful it can be. And the character is played by a middle-aged actor in whom you believe utterly when she is on screen. Malcolm’s is surely the performance of the year, and perhaps of her lifetime. It’s a portrait of a woman whose inability to compromise, to sigh and turn away from perceived danger or injustice, is both a flaw and heroic. After the Party asks if there are certain things you should not let go of, “move on” from, however much people encourage you. Is Penny a pitiable obsessive or a sane woman in an insane world that bends over backwards to explain away rather than investigate certain behaviour, to protect potential predators rather than root them out? Or has she made a genuine mistake and really is destroying an innocent man and her own family in pursuit of its resolution?
The question of Phil’s actual guilt or innocence is often secondary to the exploration of the effects of the accusation. We watch Penny’s relationships with her friends and family twist and founder (there is an extraordinarily painful scene at a funeral in which Grace gives a eulogy that stands as a monument not to the departed but to the devastating cruelty of which children are capable). We see her domestic and professional life implode – all while the more mundane traumas continue unabated; knackered freezers, ruined lasagnes, broken bike chains, rats in the compost heap. The small stuff doesn’t stop just because a large, terrible thing has arrived.
It’s the same textured layering of middle-aged life that Mare and Happy Valley attended to so closely, and gives it the same immersive quality – absolute authenticity through and through. Directed by Peter Salmon and written mostly by Dianne Taylor (Sam Shore, Martha Hardy-Ward and Emily Perkins round out the team), After the Party is brilliantly executed and the supporting characters are uniformly well-rounded and immaculately played. But Malcolm is the centrepiece. What a role. What an actor. What a performance.
• After the Party is on Channel 4 in the UK now and can be streamed on ABC iview in Australia.
