Guest Blog: Costume and Set Designer Anna Yates on Sustainability and Shag-Pile Carpet in ABIGAIL'S PARTY

Unlike what seems like the entire population of the UK, I didn’t know anything about Abigail’s Party when I began working on it with Jack Bradfield in May this year. I was, however, a big fan of Mike Leigh’s films because of his eccentric yet totally believable characters. I love his use of banal and repressed dialogue and there’s such an incredible combination of brutality and compassion in his work.

Jack and I connected on our love of the excruciating comedy of Beverly’s neighbourly gathering in Abigail’s Party.Beverly is desperate to appear stylish and wealthy to her guests, and her husband Lawrence is offensively pretentious. Lawrence points out his complete works of Dickens and Shakespeare, saying: ’They’re embossed in gold!’.

The play was devised by Mike Leigh and the original cast in 1977 at the beginning of Thatcherism, and it’s chilling to look back at this crucial moment in the march of liberalism that has seen an ever-widening gap between rich and poor in the UK. These people are looking for happiness at the top of the (shag)pile.

Alison Steadman and Tim Stearn visited the Ideal Home Exhibition at Kensington Olympia in character while developing the characters of Beverly and Lawrence. Jack and I decided to lean in to this world of domestic interior as status object, and we looked at old photos of the Ideal Home Exhibition as well as car and furniture showrooms from the 1970s. We were excited by the idea of the set as Beverly’s fantasy world full of shiny, spot-lit designer furniture, through which she could float in turquoise silk chiffon.

It was important to us that this production would feel fresh, as if this gathering could be happening today even though the text and design locate it literally in 1977. Practically, this meant finding crossovers between 1970s design and current trends, and it was lucky that 1970s styles are having a resurgence in interior design at the moment. I found it worked best to choose styles that verged on the 1980s chrome and smokey glass rather than earlier 1960s rounded forms and bright colours. I also threw in some fun, nostalgic French Rococo style touches that I thought the suburban Beverly would enjoy.

One of our earliest conversations went something like: ‘wouldn’t it be fun if… we put Lawrence’s mini onstage on a giant shag-pile!’. Most projects start with one of these conversations, but in this case, thanks to Chris Durant  and everyone at Northern Stage, English Touring Theatre, The Mercury Colchester, The Rose Theatre, and Cheshire Mini restorations, we actually made it happen. We loved the idea that Lawrence would never need to leave the stage, he could just shut himself in his beloved Mini.

All the characters in Abigail’s Party are sexually frustrated in some way, and Beverly is clearly fantasising about this tame suburban gathering becoming a swingers’ party. We wanted a giant shag-pile carpet to really intensify this feeling of latent sexual desire. A shag-pile rug can be so magnetic and repulsive all at once, and Bev definitely sees herself as the apex predator in this space.

To get a sexy 1970s showroom feel we decided on a glossy ceiling with inset spot-lights, and we went down a few different roads to try to do this. We were aiming for an ‘intermediate’ level according to the Theatre Green Book sustainability ratings, and it’s very difficult to make things look shiny without using acres of plastic! Durham Scenic, who built the ceiling panels, developed a technique with black gloss paint that was labour intensive but worked really well.

Our stage management team spent weeks trawling Facebook marketplace and eBay to find second hand items they could then spend even more time customising so that Bev and Lawrence’s furniture would look convincingly expensive. Sustainability in theatre design can only be achieved with a significant increase in labour hours, and the team at Northern Stage built this into the process so that we could achieve the ‘Intermediate’ rating.

We wanted the set to be able to work as a kind of dreamscape at times, to have a sense of Beverly’s fantasy that is incomplete and unreal, to allow for strange moments where time seems to stop and you feel the pressure of the unknown - that emptiness that Beverly and Lawrence are trying to fill with stuff.

Within the play the characters obsess over what might be happening at Abigail’s teenage house party down the street, so we wanted a surrounding void that would feel cold and kind of terrifying. Who knows what’s actually going on at that party and what the future might hold?

Abigail's party runs at Kingston's Rose Theatre from 5 – 16 November

Main Photo Credit: Steve Gregson

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