Editor-At-Large: Beverly's nibbles are still the best around

Abigail's Party, which opens at the Hampstead Theatre this week, is surely one of the most important plays of the past 25 years. It's so easy to seize on Tom Stoppard, Howard Brenton and David Hare as political writers, but Mike Leigh is far more subversive than all of them.

Because he created a huge hit there is a tendency to somehow diminish his achievement – and middle-class critics often claim that Leigh patronises his characters, satirising their working-class aspirations and lack of formal education. The fact is, people are worse educated today than when he created the play at Hampstead with the original cast back in 1977. And it would never have been filmed for television but for a drama about Northern Ireland by Caryl Churchill which was cancelled for legal reasons, leaving an empty BBC studio and a gap in the schedule. When repeated for a third time, it attracted no fewer than 16 million viewers, probably one of the highest audiences ever for a single play. Last year there were 49 amateur productions of Abigail's Party in the UK alone, performed from Barnstaple to Edinburgh, the Isle of Man to Brockley. And the monstrous Beverly appears in Greek, Dutch, German, French and even Icelandic. Abigail's Party is part of the drama GCSE. It has spawned a genre of drawing-room comedy, where a night of torture unfolds in a working-class home in which the upwardly mobile are mocked by their peers. A recent example at the Royal Court, The People are Friendly by Michael Wynne, collected excellent reviews and ended last night. To me it just seemed like second division Mike Leigh, gratefully received by an audience fed-up with grim realism and social rant.

Like all great works of art, Abigail's Party is a perfect vehicle for critics and semiologists to project all their pet theories on to – it just soaks them up. Log on to any of the 4,000-plus internet mentions of the play and you can have many happy hours of fun howling with laughter at what Beverly represents to these "experts", from "alpha female" to "an impersonation of a person". The word "nibbles" has been picked over more times than those cheese and pineapple chunks ever were in the original production. Beverly's house has been under the spotlight, too, and with a downstairs toilet it clearly represents the home of the upwardly mobile working classes. To many fans, Beverly personifies all that is vile and materially grasping and only rivals Bette Midler in her status as a gay icon. It would be tempting to conclude that Beverly was created by Mike Leigh to demonstrate the shallowness of suburban values and emptiness of lives based around acquisition and upward mobility.

But the reason why Abigail's Party still works after all these years, whether it's played by amateurs in California or professionals at Hampstead, is that the characters are timeless – and Beverly, far from being a camp monster and a control freak, is a sad and vulnerable woman, desperate for children and anxious to please. In short, she is a character we recognise regardless of language or class. Read Michael Coveney's excellent The World According to Mike Leigh for a far more sympathetic analysis of Abigail's Party and a thorough demolition job on pretentious poseurs like the playwright Dennis Potter, who denounced the play as an exercise in class snobbery. This is pretty rich from a man who thought nothing of boring us to death with the monstrous sight of Colin Welland in short trousers in Blue Remembered Hills and who spent hours of television time fantasising about busty young blondes who looked like Marilyn Monroe in The Singing Detective. Potter, for some reason, was feared by executives at the BBC, and even used a speech at the Edinburgh Festival to denounce the then director general John Birt as a "croak-voiced Dalek". His plays became more and more embarrassing, grotesque fantasies of a sick man. Mike Leigh on the other hand rarely gives interviews, preferring to let his work speak for him.

It's wrong to brand Leigh a champion of the working classes. He's far cleverer than that. What constitutes the working classes these days? Do they exist, or are they just a figment of the imagination, written about by people like Dennis Potter? No one will own up to being in this mythical social caste.

My parents brought me up to believe in the wonder of the world of work. What tosh. In the 21st century less work for more money is the goal. As more and more people work from home, the trends are multiskilling and downsizing. There aren't enough people in Britain willing to do some kinds of work, so we need to import labour. Every myth I was fed as a child about the glory of a decent job has been blown apart by technology and multinational corporations. Corus closed a steel plant in Wales last Friday because it was too expensive to transport its products to customers. Nothing to do with the skill of the workers. Leigh's work, from films such as Secrets and Lies and Naked to plays such as Goose-Pimples (in which Antony Sher plays a hapless Arab brought to car dealer Jim Broadbent's flat in north London by his flatmate Jackie, a croupier, played by Marion Bailey) are timeless studies of the human condition, rather like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Shakespeare's Richard III, not pleas for better housing or education. I shall be at the gala performance of Abigail's Party, but I draw the line at dressing as Beverly.

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Talking of social trends, nothing has been considered more outré than wallpaper (the stuff you stick on your walls, not the glossy magazine). Now I predict a change – and a thought-provoking exhibition at the Crafts Council (how I hate the word "crafts" and its macramé and patchwork-quilt connotations) curated by two of Britain's leading ceramicists, Carol MacNicholl and Jackie Poncelet. "Pattern Crazy" is room after room of riotous colour, walls covered with William Morris wallpaper hung with luscious oil paintings. The idea of "mixing and matching" suddenly seems so old-fashioned and safe. Rachel Kelly has come up with a do-it-yourself wallcovering – packets of patterns to stick on blank walls, creating your own designs. Those garish interiors in Goose Pimples and Abigail's Party were clearly before their time.

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Finally, I've discovered the best way to combat stress – a power hose. Better than drugs, and certainly more cost-effective, a couple of hours with a power hose not only gives you the simple pleasure of operating a really noisy machine guaranteed to annoy the neighbours and retaliate for their relentless lawn mowing, but you can clean all sorts of objects from garden furniture to patio paving slabs, using no chemicals or genetically modified products, just basic tap water. And at the rate it was raining last week, there won't be a hosepipe ban for some months. After spending an hour at the opening of Philip Treacy's hat exhibition the other night, I can only tell you the sound of my power hose is a lot less irritating than that of 200 fashion victims in an enclosed space. The hats are divine, shame about the people who write about them.