UNTIL JANUARY 31, BATH: Mike Leigh's modern classic paints a picture of a generation which had grown up shaking off the austerity of post war Britain and was experimenting with the trappings of new prosperity.

The set just screams Seventies, with its wood and chrome room divider, glass topped table, brown and orange soft furnishings and not forgetting the fibre lamp that changes colour.

To show that you were upwardly mobile, although the phrase had not quite been invented, you held drinks parties with cheese and pineapple on little sticks, nuts, olives, Bacardi and coke and gin, with Demis Roussos on the record player.

The perfume was Este Lauder and the car was a Mini or an Escort.

This is the setting into which Mike Leigh places his five misaligned characters, all in their way representative of the age.

Lizzy McInnerny as Beverley, the hostess from hell, finely tuned her performance to be obviously seductive, coarse, pretentious and very funny. Her husband Laurence (Huw Higginson) works himself into the ground as an estate agent to create the wealth for his self-absorbed wife to spend.

She is ignorant, tactless, tasteless, but expensively dressed and believes herself to be sophisticated.

Huw Higginson succeeds in gaining empathy for a not particularly likeable individual. Let's face it, who loves estate agents, but Higginson wins sympathy for his wife's cringe-making insensitivity toward his genuine yearning for art and literature and intelligent conversation.

These two have invited new neighbours Angie and Tony for drinks, together with nervous divorcee Sue whose teenage daughter Abigail is having her first real party across the road.

None of them are gifted with social graces and the dialogue moves from one ghastly gaffe to another as they stumble drunkenly towards a shocking end to the evening.

Liz Crowther gives a perfectly judged performance as Sue, the fish out of water who suffers breathtakingly intrusive questions about her personal life, careless insults and physical illness. Her whole being says she is longing for a huge hole to swallow her up.

Elizabeth Hopley and Steffan Rhodri are the oddly assorted neighbours. She's garrulous and naive, completely out of her depth with Beverley's mercurial bitchiness.

Tony is monosyllabic and clearly this is the last place he wants to be, until Beverley, who lusts after him from the minute he walked in persuades him to join in a very slow dance.

Again some wonderful body language says as much as Leigh's incisive dialogue. It's funny and cruel and it hurts because we all recognise the reality of the situation.

The play runs until Saturday.

Jo Bayne

Abigail's Party by Mike Leigh

Theatre Royal Bath