'Being a Salfordian is a unique thing'

Ask Google the setting of Abigail’s Party, Mike Leigh’s theatre and television play turned national phenomenon, and it variably suggests: “Beverly’s house”, “England”, “a living room”, and “the height of 1970s suburbia”. Leigh himself has remained evasive on the subject, offering “the London side of Essex” in the past, and “theoretical Romford”. So it was with some surprise that I left our office at the top of the Royal Exchange and went down to the theatre at the bottom that the building is generally better known for, to watch a new stage production of Abigail’s Party that was set, without a doubt, in Manchester.

The play was first staged at Hampstead Theatre in April 1977. By November that year, it had become what it would ultimately be best known as, a BBC Play for Today: strictly a televised play, as opposed to a film, as Leigh himself has asserted. Both the staged and televised production of Abigail’s Party starred Leigh’s then wife Alison Steadman as Beverly, the tyrannical housewife who dominates the party and her guests, and in whose living room the action is set. A Liverpudlian by birth and upbringing, Steadman performs her Essex-adjacent Beverly with gruesome precision. In Natalie Abrahami’s Royal Exchange production, Kym Marsh (of Corrie fame) transforms the character into a broad-vowelled Mancunian — sending her estate agent husband Lawrence off to sell houses in Harpurhey. The result is, ultimately, inconsequential. Beverly is Beverly, regardless of what county lies unseen outside her living room window. The Guardian review of the Royal Exchange production put it nicely: at the end of the day, Abigail’s Party is set in “a middle-class cul-de-sac anywhere.”

So the question is not why Abrahami set the production in the North West, but rather, why Leigh didn’t. Leigh himself is Salfordian, and spent the majority of his childhood in the neighbouring cities. But of the 16 films and 9 BBC plays that he’s written and directed over the course of his career, only one is set in Manchester (and 19th century Manchester at that), and one in Salford, and the vast majority are set in London. Leigh himself was eager to trade the north for the capital, and did so in 1960 at the age of 17, when he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The impact that the city had on him, and he on it, is palpable. In an article for The New York Review, critic Ian Buruma writes that it’s “hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh.” Leigh’s London, he explains, “is as distinctive as Fellini’s Rome or Ozu’s Tokyo.”

But it would be wrong to suggest that Leigh’s upbringing, and particularly his northern heritage, has had no influence on his work. Leigh’s paternal grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Manchester, where his grandfather opened half a shop on the corner where Cheetham Hill Road meets Caernarvon Street — the other half of the shop belonging to a tailor. He worked there as a portrait miniaturist, painting and framing tiny duplicates of photographs, eventually expanding into a small business named ‘Progress Limited’. Leigh recalls the premises as having an “attractively Bohemian air” that he attributes in no small part to the abundance of chain smokers, according to Michael Coveney in his biography ‘The World According to Mike Leigh’. At the time, Leigh’s family were the Leibermanns, but they changed their name in 1939, as Coveney puts it, for “obvious reasons”.