Mike Leigh’s 1970s classic play ‘Abigail’s Party’ focuses on an evening of domestic hell in the guise of a suburban drinks soirée. While teenager Abigail parties a few doors away, the pretentious Beverly and her estate agent husband, Laurence, entertain their neighbours – Abigail’s mother, Susan, ex-footballer, Tony, and his wife, Angela. But as the alcohol flows, tensions in the hosts’ barely functional marriage emerge and their obsessions, prejudices and petty competitiveness are ruthlessly, and hilariously, exposed. ‘Goose-Pimples’, meanwhile, is easily as sharp and uncompromising. This time, the action focuses on ambitious casino croupier, Jackie, and Saudi businessman, Muhammad, who meet – and misunderstand – one another spectacularly.

Abigails Party And Goosepimples

Literature & Fiction

Leigh, Mike

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Uk

40th anniversary edition with a new introduction by Mike Leigh. Forty years on from its first performance at the Hampstead Theatre and original screening on BBC1 soon after, Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party - telling of two marriages spectacularly unravelling at an awkward neighbourhood drinks party - remains a pinnacle of British theatre. Here is the original script, complete with a new introduction by Mike Leigh describing the play's unlikely genesis, how it came to be made and where he believes it fits within his oeuvre as one of the country's leading writers and directors. 'The play came from my intuitive sense of the spirit and the flavour of the times, and from a growing personal fear of, and frustration with the suburban existence' Mike Leigh, from his new introduction 'Leigh's play isn't simply about marriage and Essex, but also about the unhappy state of the realm' Guardian

Abigail's Party: 40th Anniversary Edition

VIKING

Three screenplays by Mike Leigh. "Naked" presents a bleak picture of urban society, "Life is Sweet" is a gentle comedy in which the pain of everyday life is borne with a wry smile, and "High Hopes" is a comedy of class-ridden life in contemporary Britain.

Naked and Other Screenplays

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Faber&Faber

Secrets &amp; Lies was awarded the Palme d'Or for Best Film at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of Hortense, a young black Londoner who goes in search of her birth mother. Hortense's voyage of discovery leads her to Cynthia - a depressed, unmarried, white woman who has uneasy relationships with both her second daughter and her brother. Hortense's attempt to uncover the hidden, almost forgotten, world of her parents fundamentally affects each of the characters. The film culminates in a lunch party at which the characters reveal the secrets that have blighted their lives, and with this outpouring of truth comes the possibility of renewal.

Secrets and Lies

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Two young women who shared a flat together in university re-unite after six years. As they re-acquaint themselves with each other, their past comes flooding back to them. In the course of their weekend they come face to face with others from their past and have to confront the inadequacy of their lives and the diminishment of their dreams. Career Girls is a moving, yet also hilarious, depiction of friendship, in which the humour is suffused with an unsentimental tenderness.

Career Girls

In this screenplay, Mike Leigh-director of Secrets and Lies-brings Gilbert and Sullivan and fin de sicle London to life 
W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were the most astonishing partnership in the history of musical entertainment, and in Mike Leigh's first historical film-as well as his first film to use famous characters from an earlier era-their lives and times are fully, richly explored. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, all things Japanese enjoyed an unexpected vogue in London society. This was not lost on the celebrated duo of Gilbert and Sullivan, who promptly set to work on The Mikado. Leigh's film presents the trials and tribulations they encountered in bringing their best-loved operetta to the London stage. It re-creates the lost grandeur of Victorian London and its great palaces of entertainment: a city of swirling fog and sputtering gaslights, of horse-drawn carriages and their irascible cabbies, of the newly rich, the nobility, the clubmen and courtiers, the Gaiety Girls and their stage-door Johnnies. Known not only for his acclaimed films, including Secrets and Lies, Naked, and High Hopes, but also for his unusual working method whereby his films are created through improvisation with the actors, Leigh has extended his considerable range still further in this extraordinarily vibrant new work. 
20 Black-and-White Photographs

Topsy-Turvy

After his critically acclaimed departure to period drama with Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh returns to the more intimate explorations of working-class life that marked his early career with All or Nothing. Set in a London housing project over one long weekend, Leigh’s masterful and moving new film tells the story of Penny and Phil—a long-estranged couple brought together again after their son becomes suddenly and violently ill. An unflinching look at the often harsh realities of London’s down-and-out, All or Nothing is also Mike Leigh’s most nuanced and heartfelt film to date.

All or Nothing (Faber and Faber Screenplays)

This new revised edition brings Mike Leigh's career up-to-date, with the release of Peterloo. Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets &amp; Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake) - Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema's pre-eminent figures. Now, in this definitive career-length interview, he reflects on all that has gone into the making of his unique body of work. In their commingling of bleakness and humor, Leigh's films recreate the tragi-comic world of people whose everyday lives are far from glamorous: a world in which 'the done thing' usually prevails, contrary to our inner hopes, wants or needs. Leigh's work has always reflected its times and entered the vernacular, whether the harsh studies of Meantime and Naked or the humor of the now-legendary Abigail's Party and Nuts in May. Above all, Leigh is an accomplished storyteller, and these films deal with universal themes: births, marriages and deaths, parenthood and failed relationships, families and their secrets and lies. Within these pages Leigh speaks to Amy Raphael more openly than ever before of his life and inimitable working method, revealing himself as passionate, forthright, no sufferer of fools, but the owner of a dry and playful Mancunian wit.

Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

British suburbanites Laurence and Beverly are entertaining their new neighbors, Angela and Tony as well as Susan, whose teenage daughter, Abigail is having a party to which Susan has been dis-invited. Over drinks and snacks, cliches and fatuous small talk abound.

Abigail's Party

History & Criticism

Samuel French Inc Plays

Jean works in a garage and consoles herself with alchol and perfunctory sex. Jean’s insistent neighbor, Dawn, and Dawn’s Irish laborer husband Mick, and Mick’s spineless friend, Len, all join her in a funny, drunken, sad celebration of their mutual affection and bleak lives.

Ecstasy

Nick Hern Books

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Books by Leigh, Mike