Lyn Gardner Catches Up With Tamzin Outhwaite as Abigail's Party Returns to London in August

When director **Nadia Fall **offered Tamzin Outhwaite the chance to play Beverly, the monstrous hostess with the mostest, in a revival of Mike Leigh’s seminal comedy, Abigail’s Party, the star of EastEnders and numerous West End shows, including Sweet Charity and Boeing Boeing, initially hesitated.

“Alison Steadman was so iconic in the role that when anyone thinks of Beverly, they think of her,” says Outhwaite when we talk on the phone, where she is on tour with the show before it heads into the Harold Pinter Theatre in London in early August. “How do you make it your own?” was the question at the front of her mind. 

Leigh’s play, which opened at Hampstead Theatre in 1977, offers a brilliantly funny slice of suburban life set “on the London side of Essex” where, on a new housing estate, bored, unhappy Beverly, married to workaholic Laurence, is entertaining her neighbours with cheese and pineapple sticks and lashings of Demis Roussos and alcohol. As the Bacardi and coke flow, so too do the tensions—marital and class-related—in a play which at times seems to be nodding to that American classic, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but which is infinitely funnier. It is absolutely brilliant on that peculiarly British art form: passive aggression. 

The original production was filmed by the BBC and broadcast in the Play for Today slot, getting an audience of 16 million people in an era long before streaming services. 'Being a Beverly' became a byword for a particular kind of status-conscious one-upmanship. The broadcast turned Steadman into a star. 

For Outhwaite the challenge was in recognising Steadman’s grip on the role but not being intimidated by it. How she did that was by drawing on her own 1970s Essex childhood. 

“I thought to myself, I know this woman; I know Beverly because I saw firsthand women in Essex in the 1970s, and I realised I could bring some other colours to the role taken from my upbringing and what I saw in my own house and the houses of my friends. The play feels authentic to the people I knew back then.” 

The reviews from the Theatre Royal Stratford East production, where Fall was then artistic director before moving to the Young Vic, suggest that Outhwaite has triumphed, bringing new complexities to Beverly in a staging which neatly underlines the class tensions and adds an extra smartly conceived layer to proceedings by casting new neighbours Tony and Angela as Asian newcomers to the area. 

“Beverly is a real pleasure to play, but you have to check yourself and not go too far,” says Outhwaite, who argues that now we would probably now label Beverly as “a narcissist". She adds, "She wants to be queen bee, but I think she is bored and sexually frustrated and sad. She is constantly trying to manipulate peopeople andd talk up her own status to make herself feel better.”