Your true self
In an introduction that Mike Leigh wrote for the 40th anniversary of the play, he said that all of his plays and films “dealt with the tension between conforming or being your true self.”  Undoubtedly Beverly has adopted a whole set of ideas that she believes that she should live by in her aspiration to belong to the successful middle-class. These include the style of her home, her own appearance, the job that her husband does and the income it brings. Her performance as the hostess of the evening is carefully contrived, no doubt including details that she has gleaned from Cosmopolitan magazine. Leigh described Beverly as “an aspirational working class girl who is totally preoccupied with appearances and received notions of behaviour and taste.”  But who is the true Beverly?

There are a number of clues in the play that suggest that her self-conscious behaviour disguises underlying insecurity and unhappiness. Some of this may start from her childhood home, where she reveals that her “parents have not spoken to each other for twenty years, and as long as I can remember, my father has slept in the boxroom on his own.”  She goes on to refer to her mother being “really ill with her nerves”, a distress that she herself has admitted to as the cause of her multiply failing to pass her driving test. In a surprisingly stark outburst, she says she hates her father. “We all hate him.” It’s a brief eruption of deep-seated anger.

Nadia and I talked in the podcast about how for all her material comfort, Beverly is frustrated in her day-to-day life with Laurence. She says repeatedly that she is bored. We know from her conversation with Angela about lipstick that she used to advise customers on their makeup, but this is in the past and no mention is made of her working now. So we can imagine that she is stuck at home while Laurence works long days. She also says in passing that she was “lonely” when she moved into their house.

No wonder that she wants to have a drink, a dance, and a flirt, or more. She is stifled in her apparently ideal suburban life, and as Nadia suggests, she wants to break free.

There is another detail that might tell us something about who the real Beverly is. When Angela asks her whether she would like to have children, she replies that she doesn’t like the idea of going through childbirth, and she imagines that looking after a baby would be a messy business. It would certainly be difficult to maintain her pristine home and appearance. Perhaps the trauma of her family has also put her off the idea of having her own children. We can of course take Beverly’s reply at face value. However one might also wonder if this is her true self speaking. It could be that if the subject has ever been broached in the three years of their marriage, she and Laurance don’t agree about it. She drops not too subtle hints that they may not be having sex as frequently as she would want, or as required. According to the critic Michael Coveney, “the whole point about Beverley is that she is childless, and there is a sense in which that grotesque exterior carapace is a mask of inner desolation.” 

Despair at her childlessness may be an assumption too far, but there is no doubt that much of Beverly’s true self is subsumed under the armour of social appearance, struggling to get out.