What is the 21st-century equivalent of 'cheesy pineapple ones'? Who is 2007's answer to Demis Roussos? Such are the questions - nay, creative challenges! - facing the team behind the BBC's follow-up to Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, as announced at the weekend. The play's updating will likely be seen as sacrilege by its legions of fans. The 1977 original, with an indelible turn from Alison Steadman as Beverley ('another little top-up, Ange?'), was recently ranked just outside the top 10 of an all-time best British telly poll. But Abigail lovers should take today's news as a compliment: all great works of art inspire spin-offs and re-imaginings.
And yet the revamp raises questions. Is it possible to update a comedy of manners? Isn't 'Abigail's Party' specific to 1977? To Leigh, the play succeeded in part because 'it intuitively and instinctively took the temperature of what I believe is called the zeitgeist'; its depiction of a socially mobile working class substituting property for community presaged Thatcherism. Whatever today's zeitgeist is, it's far from certain it can be expressed by a drama 'exploring the lives of three middle-class couples who live in the same Hertfordshire village'. That's the premise of screenwriter Tony Grounds' updated version, which labours under an uninspired working title, The Dinner Party.
Of course, the Abigail de nos jours may seek merely to crack a few jokes about contemporary social foibles. (For Beaujolais in the fridge, read wind turbine on the patio.) There are still laughs to be had in social climbing: Graham (John Shuttleworth) Fellowes has a great character these days called Dave Tordoff, who ploughs a similar nouveau riche furrow. ('It'd be lovely to say to my wife: "There you go, there's 5k - get your tits done."') But the danger with this approach is that the Abigail template is reduced to what Leigh's critics always claimed it to be: a mean-spirited caricature of upstart proles. If the BBC's update is to do the 1977 original justice, it needs not only Leigh's unforgiving eye for social mores, but also his ability - which Abigail's Party exemplified - to take the temperature of the times.
