Cambridge Arts Theatre – until Saturday 8th August 2026
Reviewed by Steph Lott
5*****
There’s a moment early in the second half of this touring production where Tamzin Outhwaite’s Beverly moves around her living room ordering her guests to eat, drink, dance, sit, smoke— and it becomes suddenly, grotesquely clear that she isn’t just hosting a terrible drinks party. She’s manipulating everyone at one. Guests are handled like puppets, strings pulled one at a time, and suddenly it’s not funny anymore.
That reframing is what makes this Beverly worth seeing, more than fifty years after Mike Leigh devised the piece with Alison Steadman and the original Hampstead Theatre cast. Steadman’s Beverly is a monster of bad taste who doesn’t quite know she’s monstrous — gauche, oblivious, and funny precisely because the gap between her self-image and the horror she’s inflicting on everyone else is so wide. Outhwaite’s Beverly is different. Somehow she is not only bad at reading the room but also manages to control it. It’s a such a different performance and not an impression of Steadman’s. The comedy is there in spades but it curdles faster, and the menace sits closer to the surface throughout.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the play’s most notorious sequence, when Beverly gropes Tony under Laurence and Angela’s noses. Play this moment as tipsy obliviousness and it’s excruciating comedy. Outhwaite plays it as calculation: her hands are on Tony, but her eyes are on the rest of the room, watching for the reaction she’s engineering. Tony isn’t the point. He’s the instrument. The seduction is aimed at Laurence and Angela, who dance with superb awkwardness, and it lands with real, uncomfortable heat.
Nadia Fall’s direction gives this version of Beverly room to develop and unfold. She is cruel and calculating but still shocked at the tragic outcome of the evening. The rest of the ensemble hold their own against Outhwaites’s Beverly: we dislike and feel sorry for Craig Hamilton’s Laurence in equal measure. Omar Malik’s stolid and sexy Tony is charismatic but we don’t know whether we should like him or not. This also goes for Lauren Patel’s irritating Angela, getting drunker and more annoying with each gin she swallows. Pandora Colin’s Sue provides a perfect contrast to them all. Nobody gets swallowed and each character has their moment.
It’s very funny. It’s also more disturbing than I expected a drinks party to be. At the end of the performance the whole audience erupted in cheers and applause which were very well deserved.