Abigail's Party @ Theatre Royal Brighton

There's a particular strangeness in watching a piece of queer-adjacent camp iconography turn into comfort food. Abigail's Party has long occupied a funny corner of gay cultural memory; Beverly Moss as accidental drag icon, that swaying dance to Demis Roussos passed round at parties for decades, the cheese-and-pineapple hospitality of hell quoted back and forth like scripture. Nadia Fall's revival at Theatre Royal Brighton knows exactly what it's been handed, and it delivers that inheritance with real technical assurance. It's just that knowing your own legend so well can tip a production into recital rather than performance.

Tamsin Outhwaite gives Beverly everything the role demands aided by an impressive blonde Farrah cut, with the towering heels, the over-poured drinks, the swanning cruelty dressed up as hostessing. She's commanding, slightly manic but never lets the character's nastiness curdle into caricature, there's a real woman in there, lonely inside her own suburban stagecraft. But the production seems to trust that we already love Beverly, rather than earning that love scene by scene, and so a lot of Outhwaite's best work plays like a victory lap.

The design is perfect, Peter McKintosh's costumes and set nail that uncanny 1977 register that now doubles, unhelpfully for the play's satire, as fashionable "mid-century modern"; the effect is that a room built to look tacky and try-hard now reads as rather tasteful, which undercuts some of the original bite and I thought, Beverly, darling, you were simply ahead of your time and nobody appreciated it. Howard Harrison's lighting adds a few nice touches of atmosphere without overpowering the domestic claustrophobia the play needs.

The play stays rooted in its 1970s attitudes, casual racism, misogyny, and class snobbery all present and unsoftened, alongside domestic violence and a couple of uncomfortably jokey references to rape, left unexamined. None of it's been updated, sitting alongside the constant smoking as a reminder of how much the period's casual cruelties remain untouched

The performance to single out, oddly, isn't Beverly at all. Sue (played by Pandora Colin) meant to be the evening's pale, apologetic non-drinker, quietly disintegrating next door while her teenage daughter's actual party rages unseen, is given a lovely, understated sadness that the rest of the production doesn't quite match. Where everyone else is turned up to the show's expected pitch, Sue is allowed to be small, awkward, genuinely adrift, and for a few minutes the play stops being a greatest-hits set and becomes something sadder and stranger.

That's the frustrating thing about this staging: it's well-drilled and well-designed, the marriages fray convincingly, the second half does properly accelerate into disaster, and the class comedy still has teeth, or veneers at the very least, nearly fifty years on. But so much of the production seems built around the audience's foreknowledge rather than trying to surprise them anew. Every iconic line lands like a chorus everyone's been waiting to sing along to, and the show seems content to let them.

Which brings me to my companion and me, sitting rather stiffly through an auditorium that was, by contrast, laughing before punchlines arrived, murmuring lines a beat ahead of the actors, visibly delighted every time Beverly refilled a glass. It's an odd, slightly isolating position to be in at a play so many people clearly adore, and I'm honestly not sure whether that says something about the production, or about us. Maybe the party was never really for us in the first place; maybe we just wanted it to surprise us the way it once surprised everyone else.

Anyway. Lovely evening, it's worth going. Everyone adored it, mostly. Beverly will be having people round again very soon, and this time she'll try the Demis Roussos again, because really, why change a winning formula. Cheese straw, Sue?

Until Sat 1th, Theatre Royal Brigton, tickets/info.