When Melbourne Theatre Company announced last August that Stephen Nicolazzo would be directing Mike Leigh's cult comedy of manners, Abigail's Party, it prompted mixed emotions amongst those familiar with the director's distinctive voice. As displayed in the impressive canon of productions for his own company, Little Ones Theatre, Nicolazzo's theatrical vision is rich and uncompromising; a stylistic identity that shows both clarity of purpose and fearless individuality. Pairing storytelling from a queer perspective with a sumptuous visual language, his productions seem able to embrace otherness with a subversive tenderness while at the same time confronting conformity with raw, untamed erotic energy.
Reviews of Nicolazzo's past successes, as he has confidently risen through the ranks of Melbourne's independent theatre scene, have frequently questioned when a major theatre company might take note of such a talent. So, to see the state's premiere outfit finally heed those calls was certainly cause for celebration. But what of the play slated for Nicolazzo's mainstage debut, Abigail's Party? This was harder to understand.
Leigh's caustic satire on the ascendant middle class of '70s Britain is a truly iconic work of English theatre, first performed on stage in 1977, but best known from its TV iteration, broadcast by the BBC that same year. It centres on an intimate soiree thrown by Beverly and Laurence Moss, who represent a perfect emblem of the unparalleled social mobility that had seen class divides bulldozed in the decades following the war. Tony and Angela Cooper, recent arrivals on the street, have been invited to the Moss home for a few drinks to welcome them to the neighbourhood, along with another neighbour, divorcee Sue, whose teenage daughter Abigail is throwing a party down the road. Toeing a fine line between pantomime ridicule and incisive social commentary, Leigh uses this middle-class microcosm as a comic study of British suburbia's shifting milieu, needling the dilettante affectations and taste-lite attitudes of the time. But it's also a play about the quiet tragedy of so many disaffected women, living in a time when the burden of a happy marriage and a model home was expected to be shouldered entirely by the lady of the house.
"I'm still bringing my aesthetic and my irreverence and my queerness to the way I'm reading the work."
Like much of Leigh's work, the development of the play's five characters was a collaborative effort, working with his actors to discover the fine detail of their roles. Through extensive improvisations, the substance of these characters became intricately calibrated to the natural nuances of those performers, enabling the original cast - helmed by the legendary Alison Steadman as loud, lusty lush, Bev - to inhabit the world of Abigail's Party with absolute authenticity. In a not dissimilar way to the megalomaniacal control found in Samuel Beckett's stage directions, Leigh's plays are inherently resistant to reimaginings. But since Nicolazzo's brand of theatre hinges on invention, surprise and subversion, it begged the question: could Leigh's text and Nicolazzo's direction ever be compatible?
Nicolazzo insists, there's more synergy between the queer narratives he's known for and Leigh's tale of middle-class dysphoria than meets the eye. "It is weirdly, in its own way, still about transgressive behaviour," he observes. "This is a group of people who, while heterosexual, are still really struggling to deal with the confines of societal oppression and expectation they are expected to abide by. They act out in these kinds of debauched, and even psychotic ways as a form of unconscious protest."
Another potential hurdle facing a director staging this work is its inextricable connections to both its '70s period and its British location. Nicolazzo, however, has not allowed too much reverence of the play's particulars to constrain his creativity. "This is a question that could relate to any number of plays. But for me, it's important not to let a production be purely about place or time. And Abigail's Party is full of issues that still have a lot of relevance for contemporary Australians, like the pressure to be more cultured or worldly, the expectation to live lavishly or materially," he explains. "I also find some strong personal connections in this play, because it's dealing with people who come from working-class backgrounds, who find themselves existing in a world they don't feel they belong to. And also, I think, on a purely human level, when anyone is placed in a situation where they feel trapped or overlooked or undervalued, they're going to want to combust. And that's what's so powerful about this play, because those nagging realities are just simmering beneath the surface of these social niceties, until the pressure builds and the charade just explodes. I think that psychology is still so relevant and recognisable."
And it isn't just Nicolazzo who has a weight of expectation to contend with. Taking the mantle of Bev from Alison Steadman, Pip Edwards is facing the challenge of finding a unique perspective on a role that already has an indelible portrayal attached. While it's likely flavours of Steadman's original will still be present in her performance, Edwards is taking a similar tack to her director, searching out the parts of Bev that connect to the now. "The reality of her, the truth behind the kind of fantasy she wants people to believe in, it's pretty bleak. But I think also kind of familiar," she shares. "Bev's frustrated, she wants to be perceived in a certain way, she believes in the glamour and glitz of fashion magazines and make-up ads. And you can almost imagine that if she lived today, she'd be hugely into Instagram. And that idea of being stuck in a rut and desperately aspiring to something that is itself a kind of make-believe - that 'beautiful people with beautiful bodies living beautiful lives' kind of thing - is something that I think is even more visible now than back in the '70s."
But beyond discovering those aspects of contemporary culture that share an unexpected resonance with Abigail's Party, there is also a sense of daring about this particular director choosing to tackle this particular play. Ambition is a quality that has long been evident in Nicolazzo's previous outings, perhaps most notably in his recent collaboration with Melbourne playwright Dan Giovannoni, on a new stage adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas' anthology of short stories, Merciless Gods. This was a far from straightforward project, but Nicolazzo and Giovannoni's gamble paid off, delivering a masterfully crafted show that stayed true to Tsiolkas' powers as a storyteller while still hitting all the necessary beats to make it a quintessential Little Ones Theatre production. There's a similar bravery in Nicolazzo's decision to make Abigail's Party the platform for his most prestigious endeavour to date; a willingness to defy expectations and take risks without the assurance of success.
"In part, there's definitely an element of me trying to exercise different muscles," Nicolazzo says. "But I'm still bringing my aesthetic and my irreverence and my queerness to the way I'm reading the work. You can apply all those things to a heteronormative story and still get something really transformative out of it. In part, I chose Abigail's Party because I wanted to see if I could apply my love of camp and my love of queer imagery into a context that's different or atypical of those things. And I think if you look at the character of Beverly - she's damaged, is often viewed as monstrous, is sexually shocking, is yearning for something - I read her as queer. Just because she has sex with men doesn't mean she's any less challenging to the heteronormative patriarchal norm, where women were at the mercy of marriage and motherhood and all those other traditional expectations. And she wants to escape that world. That, for me, is queer."
Melbourne Theatre Company presents Abigail's Party, until 21 April at Southbank Theatre
