The drama in Abigail’s Party focuses on the toe-curling intrigues in Bev’s suburban living room over the course of her car-crash soiree. But what about the eponymous do in Mike Leigh’s comedy of manners – the party next door, thrown by the teenage Abigail while her mother, Sue, languishes at Bev’s?
Abigail, who remains an offstage McGuffin in Leigh’s play, is now set to take centre stage in a complementary spin-off production alongside a revival of Leigh’s 1977 satire at Watford Palace theatre. Abi’s House Party will show us what happens at Abi’s bash while the adults are having their meltdowns.
Other dramatists have already focused on the life of this absent character, such as Atiha Sen Gupta in her 2018 play Abi, but this production is a full-on imagining of the party itself, with a 30-strong cast of young actors whose ages range from 11 to 25. Much of the action will happen offstage, and will be reported by characters – as is often the case at parties.
James Williams, the theatre’s associate director, suggested dramatising a spin-off teen house party alongside Leigh’s play in 2020, before the pandemic, and was heartened when actors from the theatre’s youth company watched the TV adaptation, starring Alison Steadman, and identified with its observations on social awkwardness, despite its period detail – from pineapple on sticks to Demis Roussos. “People talk about it as a play specifically about class but it’s really a human play,” says Williams.
Abi’s House Party was jointly devised by members of the Palace Young Company, Palace Youth Theatre and Young Orbital group, with some of the same improvisation techniques that Leigh is said to have used for the original: actors focusing on the movements and mannerisms of people they know as a way of fleshing out characterisation. There is a range of partygoers, from invited guests to gatecrashers and hangers-on.
Williams, as its director, tried not to impede the young artists’ vision for the piece. “I wanted it to be as authentic as possible.” It will cater for two audiences, he adds, those who know and love Leigh’s play but are curious about the “other” party up the road, and the younger contingent interested to see a play about a teen party.
It is set in the contemporary world, reflecting the reality of teen culture and party protocols today, and performed on the same set as Abigail’s Party, with a central 1970s shelving unit as a backdrop which will be redressed, the period objects swapped for contemporary ones.
Importantly, it has evolved from its original vision in 2020 to incorporate some of the anxieties that have emerged for young people over social rituals since, as a result of lockdown. “We can’t talk about partying without people’s reference points being very different to what they were before,” says Williams.
Megan Breen, a 24-year-old creative facilitator at the Palace Young Company who is playing a 20-year-old gatecrasher, feels the play offers a commentary on being a teenager – of “wanting to be an adult but not knowing how to get there” – and also the psychological and social effects of the pandemic on teen life. Many young people became habituated to living in solitary ways, she says, and were then thrust into social situations that may now seem much more frightening and overwhelming.
“During the pandemic, my age group went back to the teenage house party because we couldn’t go out to clubs and bars, and it was good to rely on just each other to have fun. We knew how to socialise, but I was working with groups [for this production] who grew up in the pandemic and didn’t know how to behave in a social context; so 17-year-olds who have never been to their first house party, and who now feel really awkward … They remain the social age they were before the pandemic.”
Abigail’s Party is at Watford Palace theatre until 2 April. Abi’s House Party runs from 6-7 April.
