What it really means to be a fifth-wheel

As I was reading the text to Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, I found myself drawn not to the louder and more obnoxious participants in Beverly and Laurence’s cocktail party, but to the obvious odd-one-out: the quiet and reserved Susan. In a number of ways Susan brings to the gathering a personality and set of life experiences that clash with her coupled hosts and the newly married Angela and Tony. In addition to her longer residence in the community and her older house, Susan is not only unmarried, but divorced, and is the only member with children. This token of Susan’s difference is ever-present throughout the play, through reference to the party her daughter Abigail is hosting just a few doors down.

However, while the foreignness of Susan’s lifestyle to the two couples is apparent to an outside observer, the other characters seem unwilling to acknowledge this difference. Rather, they attempt to suppress it, refilling her drinks and arranging pillows behind her back despite her obvious but ignored reluctance. Even when she expresses ideas in conversation that differ from her hosts’, she is met with stifling replies such as Laurence’s “Well, that’s a matter of opinion. Would you like another drink, Sue?” (40).

As the drama progresses and tension among the characters rises, the threat presented by this notion of ‘the other’ becomes more apparent. Laurence disappears from the scene at several intervals, at one point along with Tony in order to check on the gathering at Susan’s house, an idea with which Beverly is becoming more and more preoccupied. Their separate returns are never explained, and Laurence’s vague reassurances that "everything seems to be all right" (35), along with Tony’s mysteriously damp shirt only add to an unexplained threat. Among the gathering there is rising a sense of menace that is becoming associated not only with Susan's lifestyle and her daughter’s party, but with the increasingly apparent instability of each couple’s suburban lives.

When the tension finally culminates in an explosion between Beverly and Laurence, and Laurence’s subsequent heart attack, the disturbed nature of the initially demure situation is finally brought into the open. While the threat of the unknown had previously been attributed to things exterior to the tidy setting, as it had been with Susan and the omnipresent Abigail, the chaos in each of the other characters’ own lives can no longer be contained by their attempts to ignore it.

Perhaps Susan is the most intriguing character because in the suburbanites’ seemingly generic existence, she represents the link between the unknown ‘out there,’ and the unknown that exists just below the surface.