Abigail's Party - Characters

Characters

• Beverly Moss - A department store make-up representative, 'a quondam beautician', she has failed her driving test three times. During the play, she flirts with Tony and is always trying to impress her guests. She considers her taste in music (Jose Feliciano/Demis Roussos, Tom Jones) and art (kitsch erotica) to be every bit as good as that of her husband. Immensely proud of her home, she nonetheless admits that she cannot use the gadgets in her kitchen. Beverly throughout the night offers her guests drinks and cigarettes (despite the fact that Tony and Angela have recently given up), which they usually refuse but end up taking due to her being unable to take no for an answer. Beverly effectively forces her guests to agree with her on most topics, for instance on the music they should listen to, or whether olives should be served, in each instance using their apparent consensus to score points with her husband. Despite her 'sophisticated' tastes and carefully groomed appearance, she was memorably described by Alan Bennett as having "shoulders like a lifeguard, and a walk to match." According to the critic Michael Coveney; "Beverly is undoubtedly a monster. But she is also a deeply sad and vulnerable monster...The whole point about Beverly is that she is childless, and there is a sense in which that grotesque exterior carapace is a mask of inner desolation."

• Laurence Moss - Estate agent with 'Wibley Webb'. Laurence is Beverly's husband, and the pair frequently argue. He aspires to the finer things in life: leather-bound Shakespeare (which he admits "can't be read"), prints of Van Gogh and Lowry paintings, and Beethoven, which he forces on his guests at unfortunate moments. He seems powerless to compete with Beverly's more flamboyant persona, and compensates by working too much, as his wife points out on several occasions. He considers a brisk handshake to be correct practice after a dance. While Lawrence starts off behaving normally during the party, as he becomes increasingly hen-pecked by his wife, he begins to act in a more neurotic manner, to the point where he too becomes an annoyance to his guests. While Susan welcomes the increasing 'cosmopolitanism' of the area, Laurence doesn't.

• Angela Cooper - Tony's wife. A nurse, Angela appears very meek and somewhat childlike, unintelligent and tactless (much like Steadman's character in a previous Leigh play, Nuts in May). She can't drive, as Tony doesn't want her to. Interested in the mundane and commonplace, much to her husband's annoyance, she comes into her own when Sue feels queasy and after Laurence suffers a heart attack.

• Tony Cooper - He works in computing—merely as a computer operator, his wife twice points out—and used to play professional football for Crystal Palace but it "didn't work out". His feelings towards Angela are mixed: on the one hand he is grateful that she cared for him when he was injured; on the other hand she is a constant reminder of the injury that wrecked his footballing career. Tony is quiet throughout most of the play, usually appearing uneasy and giving one-word answers, but towards the end of the play he becomes somewhat irate and quick-tempered, particularly with his wife. Beverly flirts with him in the second half of the play, much to Laurence's annoyance. At one point Beverly asks Angela if he is violent. 'No, he's not violent. Just a bit nasty. Like, the other day, he said to me, he'd like to sellotape my mouth. And that's not very nice, is it?It certainly isn't, Ange!' affirms Beverly. The surname Cooper was not mentioned in the original script or teleplay and is taken from a picture on the Mike Leigh At The BBC DVD Boxset.

• Susan Lawson - Sue was getting divorced at the same time the other characters were getting married, as kindly pointed out by Angela. She is a quiet character who doesn't really have the courage to say no. She is the only female visibly not 'dressed-up' for the gathering; clearly, she'd rather be elsewhere. Throughout the play, Laurence attempts to find common ground with her. As originally cast, she towers over the diminutive Laurence and Beverly's exhortations for her to dance with him only compound her awkwardness.