With its slick retro-style filming and frenzied, farcical atmosphere, Sally Potter’s 2017 political-ish movie The Party captured the pseudo-sophisticated, bluntly primitive debate around the Brexit referendum. Filmed on the weekend of the vote in June 2016, (the same weekend as the Sant Joan revelries!) the black-and-white film was an instant, irreverent hit.
But too much retrospect nibbles at a message, and whether it works as a theatre piece or even stands the test of time as a film today is debatable. While short, at 70 minutes long, Potter’s film is breathable dialogue-wise by today’s Succession-style satirical standards, relying instead on cinematic touches and choreography to bring interest to near-clichéd characters.
Sergi Belbel directs this fun Catalan theatre production of The party, a production that dutifully maintains the upper middle-class British setting of that particular time. As Catalan critics have pointed out, however, by not reinventing it for a local audience or updating it to take in more recent perspectives it loses its essential serious side, its bitter-sweet melancholy.
Party host Janet (Marta Ribera) is the newly appointed shadow health minister, who celebrates her successful campaign with a soirée at home. While she slides vol-au-vents into the oven and answers calls from a cell phone tucked into her bra, her academic husband Bill (Lluís Soler) gets drunk and listens to virile music in the lounge: a boy afraid all grown up, but still sitting and staring. Bill's ample, eclectic record collection is a point of interest in the story.
Two-by-two the guests arrive, and they are a multicultural bunch: Àngels Gonyalons plays caustic American April (the cruelest month, according to TS Eliot). She shows up with her unlikely German boyfriend Gottfried (Jordi Díaz), an amusing and ridiculous New Age figure who, fast forward three/four years, and would be one of those idiots who refused a covid vaccine. Montse Guallar plays Martha, a smug woman who is psychologically abusive to her very pregnant wife Jinny (Queralt Casasayas). Finally, the bomb is dropped with the arrival of cocaine-fuelled financier Tom (Biel Durán). Played by Irishman Cillian Murphy in the original film, the actor was then ironically typecast for his association with gangster series Peaky Blinders, but is now famous for his role as Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s atomic epic.
I mention this, because, as critics have noted, the issue is that you can’t help comparing: not just with the original film, but fast-forwarding through all the stuff that's happened since - something that the play itself should have done. Perhaps you need a whole new soundtrack. Perhaps, as the story hinges on the one notably absent, the mysterious Marianne, without the shifting or shifted perspective of a now-absent camera, The party loses its fizz.
