Simon Fanshawe

Abigail’s Party was more than a celebration of naffness, says Simon Fanshawe. It was a warning about Thatcherism

Three years ago I interviewed the original cast of Abigail’s Party on the stage of the National Theatre for one of their Platform performances. It was like a revivalist meeting. It had the expectant hysteria of a pop concert.

The entire audience – apart from an American couple in the front row who looked as bemused as two nuns at a thrash rock gig – behaved like a religious congregation as they lip-synced the words of their creed, the improvised script that was developed by Mike Leigh and the five actors in 1977 for the Hampstead Theatre. They clapped every remembered phrase and gesture, and cheered at the hideous nouveau riche-ness of Beverly and Lawrence, who invite their neighbours, Tone and Angela and Sue, over for a night of Bacardi, g&t, “little cheesy-pineapple ones” and Jose Feliciano singing Light My Fire, which for some reason in later productions became Demis Roussos singing Forever.

But as the evening progressed, I realised that despite the gaggles of gay men howling at the high camp of Alison Steadman’s Beverly and the knowing hoots of derision of a middle-class crowd at red wine being put in the fridge, or Janine Duvitski as Angela describing what an “economical dish” pilchard curry was – despite all this, Abigail’s Party was more than a fiesta of naff and a hilarious opportunity to worship at the temple of tack. It was the most prescient dramatic warning of the Thatcherism to come, of the greed that would be good for two decades, of the elevation of objects and ownership beyond the value of community.

Forget the earnestness of David Hare and Howard Brenton and the angry anti-Tory denunciations of the red fringe theatre companies in the late 1970s; Leigh and his cast had vividly brought to life the gargoyles that decorated the edifice of the declining traditional working class. These were the people who turned their backs on Labour and thought that by buying their own houses in a new neighbourhood, hanging net curtains to shut themselves off from a world they didn’t have to look at and thus care about, they could take over the country for themselves. I’m Alright Jack and… Bev, Tone, Angela and Lawrence. Not that they knew that was what they were doing, or understood the effect it might have on the rest of us. They were far too self-centred for that.

Of course, no one actually talks about politics at all in Abigail’s Party. Which is the point really. Keith Joseph, Alfred Sherman and the other Tory ideologues embittered by the postwar consensus who hung their wretchedly reactionary ideas on Thatcher – they talked politics. But Thatcher didn’t. Her doctrine was entirely personal to her. She behaved as if the country was her father’s shop. She spoke to us like children, in the way of a provincial Sunday-school teacher. Thatcherism was, in the words of Nigel Lawson when he was Chancellor, “whatever Margaret Thatcher herself at any time did or said”.

It would be stretching a point even beyond the credibility of an Open University politics seminar to suggest that Beverly in Abigail’s Party is somehow Thatcher, or even a metaphor for her. But the play, as Leigh put it last week, “intuitively and instinctively took the temperature of what I believe is called the zeitgeist”. It is shot through with “received notions of how we should behave and what we should have”, he continued. “Beverly is a complete victim of suburban values.” As was Margaret Thatcher.

Richmond Road, where Bev and Lawrence live, has changed. Sue, the mother of the never-seen Abigail from whose teenage party next door she is a refugee, is middle-class. She is divorced and is part of a one-parent family. It is never articulated, but this last fact is the subject of some pity. Sue is a mild woman but clearly a free-thinking parent, and in some ways she is symbolic of the kind of bohemianism that was so rejected by Thatcher. Thatcherism was built by substituting apparent individual economic freedom for personal freedom embodied by sexual liberation. It sought to isolate the middle classes and their feckless sexual liberalism and attempted to justify the ambition of the new working class by cloaking it in the sanctity of methodist piety and calling it hard work.

Ironically, it was precisely the Tory battle cry of “Get on your bike” that broke so many traditional family ties and led to such disastrous levels of social breakdown. But aspiration was king, and communities were transformed. Sue – when pressed by Lawrence to say that their area has changed, “the class of people… the tone of the area… you don’t think it’s gone down?” – can only come up with a frighteningly polite: “It’s more mixed.” “More cosmopolitan”, counters Lawrence. Presumably he means ethnically. She thinks that’s a good thing; he does not.

They are not talking “swamping”. Leigh is too clever to do more than suggest the undertone. But it is unmistakably there. Lawrence is a Little Englander in the making, the estate agent with his bound and “gold-embossed” Shakespeare and Dickens, which he describes, with typical middle England anti-intellectualism, as “part of our heritage. Of course it’s not something you can actually read.” Naturally. It’s not there to be read. It’s there, along with the mock-Tudor houses nearby, to be a symbol of Britishness, which you certainly can’t lay claim to if you’re “cosmopolitan”.

The world of Abigail’s Party is one where you are entirely defined by what you have got, rather than who you are. Kitchens, sofas, tiling, tables: “It’s unusual isn’t it – with the wooden top and the modern legs?” “Yeah, it was expensive that one,” says Bev. And they’ve got candelabra. These people are not what they eat, they are what they own.

I remember vividly being in a pub in the very early 1980s in Brighton with a bunch of other community work types when we were turned upon by a lieutenant-colonel character, of the kind you only really seem to find in the plays of Terence Rattigan. After listening to our conversation about the local community for a while, he rounded on us in fury. “What do you lot ever do? You’re nothing. I mean do you own anything? I own a yacht and a house and a car. What do you own?” We didn’t. It defined us. The rest of the pub just sneered at us and our good intentions for the local area.

Along with her possessions, Beverly, for all her pretend permissiveness and flirting with Angela’s husband, is the very model of social conformity. She is, in Leigh’s words, “completely subdued by received notions of how we should behave and what we should have”. While the middle classes voted Tory, the aspirations that lifted Thatcher to power were really those of working people who had broken their allegiance to their own class. But having broken free of their roots and their communities, they were at sea, unanchored by any values. Thrust into milieux where they either didn’t understand the rules or just didn’t notice them, and with no collective history to guide them, they had no option but to turn entirely to the satisfaction of their own desires.

All the characters in Abigail’s party act deeply selfishly. They talk at rather than with each other. Beverly constantly pushes cigarettes, drinks, her taste in music and her advice on her guests without noticing she is doing so. The grown-ups in number 13 Richmond Road, despite having metaphorical poles up their arses which make them ill at ease with each other, try to enjoy themselves. But the teenagers next door with Abigail are the proto-punks who in a few years will be rioting against the poll tax.

Abigail’s Party described in savage detail the ingredients for the banquet of selfishness that was to dominate the Tories’ party over the next 25 years. The big recipe in the play is not for pilchard curry, it is for the triumph of material aspiration and lack of any identity for people outside the realisation of their own desires. Fortunately, before we all drown under the weight of arguments about its potential significance, Abigail’s Party is also incredibly funny.

· Abigail’s Party is at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (020-7722 9301) from July 10.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and Clarifications column, Monday June 24 2002

In an article about Abigail’s Party we quoted Mike Leigh, the director, saying Alison Steadman’s character, Beverly, was “completely subdued by received notions of how we should behave and what we should have”. Mike Leigh points out that her character in fact is anything but subdued. What he actually said (in a telephone interview) was that Beverly was “imbued with received notions…” etc.

This article originally appeared at:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,766075,00.html

No one would have accused Rob Lowe of being a fine dramatic actor in his Brat Pack days, but he did have an aura. Then came the hotel room, the girls, the scandal. Now, playing a White House aide in The West Wing, he’s revealed a flair for smart dialogue and sophisticated comedy, and a whole new career opens up. Simon Fanshawe asks him where he’s found the willpower to hang in there regardless.

He sticks his head around the door of his trailer and says, “Hi guy, come on in.” He’s tremendously chipper, trim, tanned. Right down to the perfect stubble and the piercing blue eyes, he looks exactly like a poster of himself, all nicely airbrushed. Then I notice that his hair has got highlights. He laughs. “They’re not mine. They’re my character’s. If I didn’t have them, on screen it would look like I was wearing a black woolly hat.” Although this emphasis on looks may seem terribly superficial, with Rob Lowe you have to start with the face. He’s always been pretty, and that has had a lot to do with the way his career has gone, until now.

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In the first episode of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s brilliantly written and popular eavesdrop on the White House, his character Sam Seaborn, the deputy communications director, unwittingly sleeps with a call girl – and then has a panic about whether it will ruin his career. Aha, we all thought. Clever casting. They’ve written a part that plays off the only two things that anybody knows about Rob Lowe.

One: he was a founder member of the Brat Pack in St Elmo’s Fire in 1985 – he played the rebel, the rock’n’roller, the bad boy, the one who couldn’t keep his flies zipped. And two: in 1988 Lowe slept with two girls – at once – at the Democratic convention in Atlanta, while campaigning for Michael Dukakis.

One of them was 16 and the other, her lover, was 22, and they videoed the whole thing and stole the tape. Ten months later, the mother of the younger one filed a personal injury suit. And as the balloon went up, Lowe’s career went down. He settled out of court, but got community service.

He says of The West Wing storyline, triumphantly, “I was cast after that was written.” So the sleazy resonances were a coincidence? “If Aaron was really writing to what people’s perception of me is, he’d have given me a love interest.” Then he lists the pairings in the series and, as people often do with TV they love, he uses actors’ names and characters interchangeably. “Martin [Sheen] has got Abbie [played by Stockard Channing], Brad [Whitford] has got Donna his secretary [played by Janel Moloney] and he’s now got Mary Louise Parker, as his girlfriend, and as of next week Richard [Schiff] has got Laura Dern. And I have nobody. But Aaron marches to his own drum. There’s nothing you can tell him. But if Sam had a personal life, it would definitely make him more interesting.”

Even without a love life, Seaborn is perfect casting for Lowe – and finally allows him to be more than just a pretty boy. The script suits his clipped timing, and he has developed a rather engaging, faltering, staccato delivery. And while he may not have the greatest range as an actor, it turns out that he has a considerable talent for slick delivery and sharp comedy. He describes the oh-so-optimistic Seaborn “as a master intellect with a varying level of expertise on almost everything. He’s a bit of a geek with a big sense of what is right and wrong. But when crossed he can be an unbelievable motherfucker, which is a great juxtaposition to have with his kind of exuberant puppy side.”

This allows Lowe a touch of drama and plenty of deft comedy. The West Wing is a throwback in style: the plots are driven by the witty rat-a-tat-tat of Sorkin’s dialogue that is more reminiscent of a Preston Sturges film of the 1940s or a Ben Hecht script than the dramatic realism of TV in the 1980s and 1990s. The inhabitants of the Bartlet White House are more Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant or Myrna Loy and William Powell than they are the doctors in ER or the police officers in NYPD Blue. And no one ever accused Grant or Powell of being great actors. But they were great light comedy stars. The West Wing is Lowe’s opportunity to occupy the same kind of territory. Added to which, as he puts it, “It’s a team effort. There is never any doubt about any of these people’s abilities. These are fucking amazing actors.” And being among them has put Lowe on to the A-list.

He was brought up in Ohio, in “a traditional midwestern setting, surrounded by large Catholic families”, although his much beloved grandparents, Bob and Peg Hepler, were Methodists and he was baptised Episcopalian. But his family never really went to church, he says. His parents, a teacher and a lawyer, divorced when he was young and both re-married. He is the oldest of four, two of them stepbrothers; his younger brother Chad is also an actor.

When he was 12, in 1976, his mother re-married for the second time, to a therapist, and the family moved to Malibu. Lowe hated it. “I was not a happy camper. Coming from Ohio, I might as well have been dropped in from Mars. I didn’t surf. I don’t think I had ever swum in the ocean. And I wanted to be an actor. I had since I was eight or nine. It was like being hit by lightning. At that time, if you wanted to be in entertainment, I guess you’d have wanted to be in a band. There wasn’t the culture of young actors like there is now. I might as well have wanted to be a nuclear botanist.” He was beaten up for being a sissy. “Yes. Well, I have my sissy side, and Sam has that same thing.” He adds, with almost teenage bravado, “But I definitely got kicked out of school for fighting, once.”

Co-incidentally, Sean Penn was his classmate at Santa Monica High, and the Lowes lived across from the Sheens, so he knew Charlie and Emilio a little even before the Brat Pack days. The only solace of being in LA was that, “at least if I wanted to be an actor, I was in the right place”. And he started well. He was in a TV series called Thursday’s Child, for which he got a Golden Globe nomination. Then, in 1983, Francis Ford Coppola cast him in The Outsiders, his rather dark answer to American Graffiti, George Lucas’s prescient 1970s re-invention of the teen movie. He played alongside Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Emilio Estevez. The Brat Pack was gestating.

The two signature films of the Pack, both released in 1985, were The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire. Now unintentionally funny in parts – a reminder that most of the 1980s hairdos were hair-don’ts – the films do summon up the atmosphere of an age. Still enjoyable, they were spirited precisely because they focused on the desires, problems, concerns and fears of the young. Lowe, along with the rest, came to symbolise a combination of optimism and ambition, and had the cash to back it up. It’s hardly surprising that he dived into heady excess. “I definitely enjoyed my life at that point,” he says, “I really did. It made me happy then. It wouldn’t make me happy now. It didn’t feel as if I wasn’t happy, although as I got older and started to work on myself, as opposed to just my career, I realised there were other things I wanted to deal with.” Like what? “Like acknowledging that there was great pressure from wanting to have a functioning major career from a very early age.”

As we talk, it becomes clear that what has always kept Lowe afloat is ambition and sheer graft. He may not have been in great movies, but he has always known how to keep his profile and his price up. “I don’t know what drives me. Things that I consider bad qualities, I always try and figure out where they are coming from. I don’t consider ambition to be a bad one. It’s served me very well in my life. Very well.”

By the time he reached his 20s, he was an emblematic figure on screen, and in politics, too. He was close to Jane Fonda and her then husband, the Democrat politician Tom Hayden. At 24, he was playing a prominent role in the Democratic presidential campaign. By 1988, Lowe was the new Warren Beatty, the young stud with a world view.

And then . . . well, then it got the better of him. A lot has been written about the incident with the young women. As people started snickering, the phones stopped ringing. Dukakis said, rather pathetically, several years later, “I guess I should have called him.” Careerwise, it hurt. In 1999, George magazine suggested that there were still major movie figures who continued to block his career.

Lowe is phlegmatic about all that now. “There were times when I have undermined everything I was trying to accomplish. No question of that. But what gets lost is that that’s fairly common in the human condition. It’s pretty much a rite of passage for teenagers to drink too much and be wild. And you just have more access to it if you’re famous and making money. And people are more likely to know about it.” Okay, but Rob, you weren’t quite a teenager.

The experience propelled him into rehab. “I was 26, and I thought, ‘Where do I want to be when I am 36?’ I have been drug- and alcohol-free since May 10, 1990, although I am not a square. I mean, I serve alcohol in my house. And if someone wants to get in the Jacuzzi and smoke some pot, that’s fine by me. If it worked for me, I would be right in there with you.”

He’s enthusiastic about the 12-Step programme, but has not become particularly religious. “I wish I was a more religious person. I really admire Martin Sheen for his Catholicism. It’s such a bedrock. I wish I had that in my life. Although I do pray, and I am completely shameless about it. I only pray when it suits my own needs. I’m not proud about that.” He laughs.

His bedrock has been his wife, Sheryl. They had once had a fling, but then she went out with his best mate, Emilio Estevez and, for various reasons, she and Lowe fell out. But they re-met on the set of Bad Influence, a film in which Lowe was trying, not altogether successfully, to flex his acting muscles, and on which she was the make-up artist. They became great friends again, and then more than that. When he went into rehab, she stood by him, then married him. They now have two sons, Mathew, eight, and John-Owen, six.

Lowe is touching about what he owes to Sheryl. “Of course she’s responsible in some ways for grounding me. But that’s a very unfair mantle to put on anyone. At first it’s a compliment. But then it’s unfair. She never laid down any laws with me. That’s not the loving thing to do. She just said she’d love me anyway. And I wanted to change myself in order to have someone like her in my life.”

And then, on queue, the phone rings and it’s her. They live two hours out of LA, in Montecito, where they have built a house “evocative of an English manor”. In 1992, he’d been working in England on a film of Suddenly, Last Summer, directed by Richard Eyre and starring Maggie Smith and Natasha Richardson. “And one day Sting and his wife rang, because they knew we didn’t know many people in England, and very kindly asked us for the weekend to their country house in Wiltshire. We had never been exposed to that life. That elegant, benign neglect. Wellingtons, sweaters, the dogs, the living room with the fabulous antiques, the communal eating. It blew my mind completely.” So they went back to California and built one of their own. Even before The West Wing he could afford to do that.

Although the scandal clearly affected his life and his career, he did keep on working. The movies just weren’t very good. He talks of himself “as someone who has carried movies”, or “This put me on the cycle of young writer/directors that all the studios wanted to work with”. Excuse me? Carried movies? Which ones? He comes up with Bad Influence, The Hotel New Hampshire, About Last Night and, er, um . . . And as for the writer/director bit, he did certainly write and direct a well-received hour-long short film for the Showtime network in the US, called American Untitled: Desert’s Edge. But that’s it. He has written a feature film called Union Pacific, but it is still doing the rounds to find a producer. He’s not quite on a level with his “good friend” Jodie Foster, whom he mentions at this point.

He kept alive, and even prospered, by working on medium-sized movies and on TV. In 1990, he hosted the cult US entertainment show, Saturday Night Live. Originally they asked him to guest, but he said, “Ring back when you’d like me to host.” It showed a canny understanding of how to keep himself in the public eye in the right way. His opening routine was reading from his (fictional) personal diary of the 1980s. He claims not to be able to remember the jokes now. But you can guess. It also showed off his talent for comedy, and introduced him to Mike Myers, which led to him being cast in Wayne’s World and the Austin Powers movies.

Despite all this activity, The West Wing has been his real re-entry. And, paradoxically, it has taken him away from politics. He no longer has any active involvement, and he feels that it would compromise the way people see the character of Sam Seaborn if he did. He has also changed politically. “I have gotten more conservative. On social issues – women’s right to choose, minority rights, sexual preference rights and all that stuff – I am traditional Democrat. But on the hard stuff, I have moved. I mean, we’ve been running social programmes in this country since Roosevelt, and I am not sure that we have all that much to show for it.”

And neither does The West Wing. “People in the US,” says Lowe, “obsess about the Kennedy administration – Camelot and all that. They yearn for youthful vigour and idealism, charm, intellect, vitality in government. The West Wing speaks to that same want. This show is romanticised wish-fulfilment.”

This may be why, when Bush was elected, The West Wing – or “The Left Wing” as Republicans call it – increased its popularity. Bush scrambled to victory over Gore, but most people, even the ones who did vote, probably didn’t want either of them. In truth, they might have preferred to keep Clinton. In any case, the character of Josiah Bartlet is a classic Clinton figure. He talks left and acts right. When faced with deciding whether to commute a death sentence, he agonises decently and backs the death penalty. When US military personnel are killed, he vows revenge and doesn’t hesitate to use military intervention. The parents of a murdered gay teenager withdraw their support for Bartlet because they think he is not going far enough in backing gays. In the end, it’s a show about the inside of politics as much as it is about the issues. And both the right and the left are hooked on that. As Lowe says, “In Washington, when Clinton was in office, people were very openly unadulterated fans of the show, but my sense in the Bush administration is that of course they watch it, but it’s more covert.”

For himself, Lowe is delighted that the show has not yet traded on his looks. “At the start of the third series, there are a series of flashbacks to where we all met, and Abbie, you know, the president’s wife, says to the president, ‘I like all these young people, that CJ, and the young one.’ And the president says, ‘Sam Seaborn’.” Lowe is cock-a-hoop. “You line up 100 Hollywood writers and give them one word to describe me, and it ain’t going to be young. But that’s the one that Aaron used.”

And so speaks not just a recovering alcoholic, but a recovering pretty boy.

This article originally appeared at:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,671671,00.html