We tend to remember Abigail's Party as a classic Mike Leigh comedy. But watching David Grindley's fine revival - the last production in the current Hampstead Theatre - I was struck by its sadness. Written in 1977, it is not so much a satire at the expense of the nouveau riche as a devastating portrait of marital hatred and middle class joylessness.
Thanks to the television version, almost everyone remembers Beverly swanning round her suburban lounge desperately trying to cheer her apprehensive guests: Tony and Angela, a computer operator and his nursing wife, and Susan, a middle aged divorcee in flight from her 15-year-old daughter's rumbustious party. Equating conspicuous consumption with hospitality, Beverly pours endless drinks down everyone's throats while constantly belittling her estate agent husband, Laurence, with fatal results.
Twenty five years ago what struck most of us was the play's social comedy: its brutally accurate portrait of people who link ownership with status and who surround themselves with expensive objects - a rotisserie in the case of Beverly - for which they have no practical use. But while the play can be taken as a prophetic picture of the Thatcherite 80s, it strikes me as an almost Strindbergian vision of marital loathing.
Leigh is not inviting us to laugh at his characters' pretensions: instead he is portraying a world where people are bound by mutual loathing. Beverly spends the evening sneering at her husband's sexual inadequacy while Laurence seethes with bottled rage at his wife's booze fuelled coarseness. And Tony's taciturnity reflects his detestation of a wife whose mouth he has privately threatened to seal with sellotape. Behind the suburban curtains, implies Leigh, lies not so much social aspiration as a raging despair.
You could argue that Leigh never defines its cause and leaves it to us to deduce whether it is a consequence of modern materialism. But, in Grindley's production, the play emerges as a very black comedy indeed and his cast manage to overcome the memories of their forebears.
Elizabeth Berrington's Beverly is a chilling portrait of a domestic control freak who has staged the party to humiliate her husband whom Jeremy Swift endows with a fine throttled fury. Stefan Rhodri and Rosie Cavaliero as the married guests bring a history of unhappiness and Wendy Nottingham, as Abigail's mum, offers an unforgettable study of a woman who seems to have had the life squeezed out of her. The laughter Leigh induces is not that of patronising condescension but of recognition at his portrait of a suburban hell.
· Until September 14. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
