Abigail's Party, Menier Chocolate Factory, review If you are considering seeing the Menier's revival of Abigail's Party - and you should - may I suggest that you also book for the pre-show supper in order to savour the full naff Seventies experience. It is offering a menu that includes "classic prawn cocktail," chicken Kiev, and a chocolate fondue in which to dunk marshmallows and strawberries. I have just one note for the chef. When you pierce chicken Kiev with your fork it should squirt stingingly hot garlic butter either into your eye or over your best new shirt. Disappointingly, this failed to happen when I pronged mine. Otherwise this is a night of continuous guilty pleasure. Thanks to the BBC film version, readily available on DVD, Mike Leigh's 1977 play has become a much-loved classic, while Alison Steadman's performance as Beverly, the grotesquely overbearing hostess of a doomed suburban get-together, has passed into legend. But it is also a piece that divides critical opinion. While many find it a hoot, others have complained that it cruelly holds its lower-middle-class characters up to derision for the delectation of an upper-middle-class audience that feels snootily superior in matters of culture and taste. Indeed I took that view myself when the play was last revived in the West End 10 years ago. This time, however, I was completely won over. That may be, of course, because I have become a nastier person, but I think it is due to the fact that Lindsay Posner's superb production captures the palpable pain of the characters as well as their absurdity. We certainly still laugh at them, and wince, too, as they debate the merits of Demis Roussos over James Galway on Mike Britton's brilliantly evocative Seventies stage design, a naff symphony in orange and brown, complete with fibre-optic lamp, shag-pile carpet and cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks. But crucially, we also feel for them. Beverly, brilliantly played by Jill Halfpenny in a performance that is simultaneously sexy and repellent, may turn the word "please" into a rasping threat with menaces while mercilessly bullying her husband and guests. But the actress leaves no doubt that deep down Bev is miserable and unfulfilled and probably longs for a child despite her shrill protestations to the contrary. Natalie Casey, with her pendulous lower lip, proves deeply poignant as the gauche and simple-minded nurse Angela, belatedly waking up to the fact that she has married a bully (a persuasively cruel and taciturn Joe Absolom). And there is terrific work, too, from Andy Nyman as Bev's seething, desperate husband, and from Susannah Harker as the posh, unhappy neighbour who has sought refuge in this house of horrors from her unseen teenage daughter Abigail's party taking place nearby. The play's dark ending still achieves a shattering dramatic impact, even if you know it is coming, and this terrific production must surely be bound for the West End, where it will make a fine companion piece to another recently revived Seventies classic, Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends. Until April 21.