It's all right up front: Yuppiedom, 1977, suburban English-style. Her Clairol-blonde hair in long pageboy and bangs, a silver collar on her neck, Elizabeth Berrington's just-right as smug Beverly. Gowned in neon green with breasts barely haltered, in strappy white shoes she's navigating over shag rugs, putting her favorite record on the phonograph and, on the table, nuts and "cheesy pineapple things." Dark-suited, heavy-set husband Laurence, barely in from real- estate dealings only to be phoned about an errand he must run early next morn, can't get Beverly to set out the olives he loves. But she has him fetching and serving as soon as Angela (oohing and ahhing, shiny-faced Rosie Cavaliero) in baby-doll flowered dress, arrives with taciturn husband Tony (grey-as-his-suit Steffan Rhodri).
They've just bought their first house, one of (as Abigail reminds) the smaller on "the other side" of the tract. So Angela's cooing over the brown "leather-look suite" whose throw pillows with orange leaves pick up the color scheme of dining nook and drapes. In the room divider, the most-used nook will be the bar, already visited by Beverly.
Last guest to arrive (with a Beaujolais gift Beverly promptly puts in the fridge), trim, tailored neighbor Sue (straightforward Wendy Nottingham), is nervous about her teenage daughter Abigail having a party. That Sue is divorced touches off the gals' allusions to their awful fathers, the rows Angela and Tony have, Bev's doubts she'd marry Laurence again, and plans not to have children. All the while Bev plies everyone with cigarettes and liquor while adding to Sue's dismay via reports of what can be seen of Abigail's party from the window of Beverly's.
Being able to feel superior to these denizens of "Yobbonia" either allows laughter at their tastelessness (candelabra on a plastic tabletop, cigars and Bacardi!) or at our happiness at having lived through all that -- and surviving! And were the '70s the last time people deliberately set out to get drunk at parties, set off the equivalent of a colored globe, switched dance partners for more than just dancing, and bought books to display rather than read? Can -- and do -- things meant to be social, even simply showoff, today also turn violent? Did it strike only me that things that shocked in 1977 -- vomiting, for example -- are so commonly staged now? Cheap erotic paintings and Elvis records remind that plus ca change in so many ways. David Grindley directs those ways with a sensitivity totally missing from the characters and action -- both aptly.
