Mike Leigh

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Independent, 21 July 2002

Mike Leigh: Cruel chronicler of suburbia's nasty secrets and lies

Snob or satirist? Wit or depressive? Team player or puppet-master? As 
his best-known work, 'Abigail's Party', is revived, the playwright's 
inner contradictions are as evident as ever

By David Thomson

It is natural that anyone with so sharp an ear for English chatter 
should himself be talked about. Still, the Hampstead Theatre revival of 
Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, 25 years after its première there, is 
filled with echoes and querulous questions - so many of them in the 
unique, plaintive voice of Leigh's wife at that time, the actress Alison 
Steadman. And times have passed. Just as, in 1977, her character, 
Beverly, reckoned to put a bottle of Beaujolais in the fridge, so now 
that naive practice is observed in distinguished restaurants. The gaffe 
has turned suave.

As for Leigh himself, a year short of 60, he may be inclined to think 
that he is least honoured at home, if only because his work has raised 
so many awkward questions about class and mockery. In a nutshell (it's 
difficult not to sound like Leigh with his wry use of our clichés), the 
abiding question with Mike Leigh is whether he inhabits the rich 
vernacular of working-class life and talk; whether he is using that 
whining strain as satire; or whether something in him dreads the very 
people he has spent his life listening to. It is not beyond possibility 
that all those answers have value, or that Leigh himself is chronically 
mixed in his feelings. Perhaps the unending drone of small talk that he 
hears is a coarse bow rubbing on his fine strings.

It is possible to depict Leigh as a characteristic provincial kid who 
came to London in the 1960s; to regard him as a one-time actor who 
developed extensive theories about group improvisation who has gone on 
to write and direct a series of plays and films about the English 
underclass. That interpretation tends to take everything from Abigail's 
Party to Secrets and Lies at face, or ear, value - to take them as 
thick, juicy, naturalistic slices of life that are somehow hilarious and 
deeply affecting at the same time.

But the real Mike Leigh doesn't quite fit that image. Born in Salford in 
1943, he was a doctor's son, and of Russian Jewish descent. In other 
words, the genes are not at all Mancunian working class, but far more 
exotic and thoroughly educated. And Leigh himself, though he talks of 
being a problem at school, is very smart, highly articulate and, I'd 
guess, not too far from depressive. To that extent, he is not simply a 
member of the class he describes, but its fascinated, troubled observer. 
More than that, Mike Leigh has never been simply a sponge for words, 
reproducing the ordinary talk of ordinary people. He is in love with 
language. He is a brilliant writer who returns again and again to the 
same mannered rhythms of lamentation and masochistic laceration.

full: http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=316848

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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