It was in the 1977 Jubilee year that Beverly first held her fatal drinks-and-nibbles party in suburban Walthamstow. Now, 25 years on, she is back and dressed to kill in bilious green polyester, swaying across the lounge to Donna Summeras she arranges the cheese-and-pineapple sticks for her guests.
Yes, queen bee Beverly is every bit as ghastly as you'll remember from the TV version of Mike Leigh's improvised play. But, although she is now part of the national curriculum, like the Queen she is perhaps not quite the national treasure she once was. At the New Ambassadors, I kept wondering what exactly is the point of Beverly and Abigail's Party. When we laugh, what are we laughing at? Lower middle-class bad taste and marital misery? Isn't there a touch of superiority in our chuckles?
Perhaps a sharper, more psychologically acute production than David Grindley's would help. As Beverly, Elizabeth Berrington is good but obvious. She reveals too much too soon. She is like a diva whose first appearance on stage sees her hitting all the top notes. There is nowhere else for her to go.
It is an entertainingly comic performance. But if Abigail is not to be just a ghastly caricature, she must have a tragic dimension as she bullies her guests into submission and sends her henpecked husband's blood pressure soaring. Berrington's performance allows no room for pity, and this play no room for compassion.
Looking rather tame against the viciousness of some modern satire, Abigail's Party survives most successfully as a period piece, a social document that lays bare the attitudes and aspirations of the lower middle classes. Wendy Nottingham is superb here as the divorcee whose ineffectual niceness and timidity are steamrollered by the unstoppable Beverly.
But I rather doubt this play will survive another 25 years, particularly if the rise in property prices is as relentless as the retro-revival. The loudest laugh of the evening came from the news that one of the couples had bought their house for £20,000. And at a party the other night someone handed me cheese and pineapple on a stick. Ironically, of course.
· Until April 5. Box office: 020-7369 1761
