Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Jackson Booth-Millard Directed by Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake), I vaguely knew the concept of this one-off drama in the Play for Today series, and a few clips of it looked interesting, so when I got the opportunity I didn't miss it. Basically eccentric and snobbish Beverly Moss (Alison Steadman) with husband Laurence (Tim Stern) have invited their new neighbours Angela (Janine Duvitski) and Tony (John Salthouse) round for drinks. She has also asked divorced neighbour Susan 'Sue' Lawson (Harriet Reynolds) to come while her daughter Abigail has her fifteenth birthday party downstairs. Laurence stays for a little while and sits back while Beverly tries to entertain and serve drinks to her guests making rather silly small talk, and then he leaves for a quick job. Beverly and the guests talk about easy to drop subjects such as their marriages, children and taste in music, while the host doesn't take a no for an answer asking them to have more alcoholic drinks, and she forces them to share her opinion. Laurence returns to this pretty dull atmosphere where the alcohol is slowly taking effect, and Beverly is resorting to not only boasting, being insensitive and forceful, but it gets worse. Beverly starts flirting with with Tony right in front of her husband, and he tries to get his own back with his snappy attitude when putting on music and asking them to eat and drink stuff. As time goes by Sue does worry a little about what Abigail is getting up to downstairs, but Beverly with her trying to be nice ways wants Laurence and Tony to check, but she doesn't want a fuss. Eventually the snapping from Laurence increases with the playing of the music, the dancing with each other, and the one that really does it, taste in art. It is when Beverly goes to fetch a painting Laurence really hates that the tantrums really kick off, the two female guests sit back with the two men shouting the odds. In the end, Beverly turns hateful to Laurence, who has a heart attack which turns out to be fatal, and Sue calls Abigail downstairs, and something bad happens to her too. You can tell with the one location and mostly made up of dialogue that this was based on a play, but it is actually quite realistic, I can remember situations similar that I have been in. No-one can imagine this without the central performance by Steadman, with her odd voice, repetitive "there we go", "lovely" and "no go on" phrases, and just being completely up herself. It is cringing, and to be honest I found it more uncomfortable (in a good way) than funny, but that is what makes it so good, I would definitely recommend people watch it. Alison Steadman was number 30 on The 50 Greatest British Actresses, Beverly was number 76 on The 100 Greatest TV Characters, the programme was number 18 on The 50 Greatest TV Dramas, and it was number 11 on The 100 Greatest TV Shows. Very good!

Michael Neumann Mike Leigh's jet black comedy of manners shouldn't be reviewed as a film; strictly speaking, it's a video document of his own stage play, performed as theater. The play itself is an often brilliant one-act satire, charting the total disintegration of an intimate cocktail party controlled by an aggressively bourgeois hostess (Alison Steadman) and her ineffective husband. The escalating tensions between each guest (one of them exiled from her daughter Abigail's punk rock party, heard but never seen offstage) suggest a clever parody of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', blending acute social embarrassment with moments of absurd but often hilarious tragedy. Middle class envy and pretensions have rarely been savaged with such glee, and on a purely technical level it offers a fine example of how to film a play as a play, with the camera intruding only far enough onto the stage to capture every nuance of the performances.

magicwand444 i was an avid watcher of 'play for today' because the next day at work everybody would talk about it.in the case of abigail's party people still talk about it now.when the wonderful alison steadman created the social climbing hostess beverly,she created a monster.as she strutted her stuff we cringed.her awful taste in music,her walking all over her husband,her unsubtle attempts to seduce tony,her thanking sue for the bottle of red wine and putting it in the fridge. when the play was re-screened two years later it captured an audience of 16 million.it has since become a favourite for brave amateur drama groups.my favourite story concerning this is the group that decided to stage the play and use real alcoholic drinks-they never made it to act 2.

Josh_UK I recently played Tony in a drama production, it is a brilliant play, its unbelievable painful but our whole team managed to bring out all the characters, our beverly was more stereotypical, patronising and exaggerated than ever, and our angela was more repulsive than ever. Any way mike liegh has done a great job in creating a play showing stereotypical adults of the 70's It was interesting to see how people act under times of stress and although exaggerated its shows how people coped in the 70's which was top get drunk and smoke. To be honest with you i think the teenagers at the party were being better behaved.Well done Mike a brilliant play and TV drama that will be echoed in drama studios across England for years.