The Party review – this pacey, perfectly cast thriller is enormous fun

Imagine going to a huge party in a country pile stuffed with posh Tory MPs. Now imagine being massively pregnant and unable to drink. Now imagine that the party is “Victorian freak show” themed, because the hostess thought that would be even more fun. Such is the situation Lucy Gilmour (Sarah Solemani) finds herself in at the beginning of The Party, Solemani’s adaptation of Elizabeth Day’s 2017 bestseller of the same name.

When you learn that a gun has gone off, your first thought may well be that this can only improve matters. At the very least, the circus troupe will probably decline to perform further, and I believe even posh people have to stop conga-ing to 80s hits once the police show up. Like most of us, I’d be tempted to fire the gun into the air myself.

But this is a five-part thriller, so Lucy does not shoot out the nearest chandelier and go home to bed with a packet of Hobnobs. Instead, we get a lavishly and lovingly constructed millefeuille of gloriously hateful characters, flashbacks to various points in their histories, youthful mistakes, betrayals major and minor, outright skulduggery, the odd bag of cocaine, a spot of sexual assault, some simmering class resentment, some homosexuality, some eating disorders, loyalties fraying and Douglas Hodge. His role is to occasionally march on as a bloated paterfamilias in the 1990s flashbacks, take his guests round the gun-stuffed Stable of Foreshadowing and teach them how to kill pheasants.

We open with political journalist Martin (Luke Evans), husband of Lucy and best friend of charismatic host Ben Fitzmaurice (Tom Cullen), being interviewed in a bloodstained shirt by the police. The trained eye can tell Martin has been heavily involved in whatever went down.

We then spool back to the party to begin unravelling the mystery. Characters and relationships are swiftly established, plot seeds are sown with a lavish hand and a multitude of secrets are briskly hinted at. Within a very few minutes, the audience is baited on about 30 hooks and going nowhere.

The leader of the Tory party resigns. News reaches the revellers, who immediately start hiving off into factions and plotting their next moves. Martin and Ben take a brief break to indulge in some homoerotic wrestling, which ends when Ben gives Martin a lock of Phoebe’s hair. Who Phoebe? Why hair? Phoebe dead? Phoebe when? Whoever she is, it breaks the mood and the men go back to working out how Ben can best take advantage of the coming leadership contest.

Their old schoolfriend-slash-mortal-enemy, Jarvis, is said to be preparing to run. But! He has a property scandal about to blow. Could Martin possibly have a word with him and suggest that now is perhaps not the time? It would be so bad for the Tories. Ben is thinking only of the party (political, not house, though he is eager to get back to the latter due to his chronic extroversion, for which modern medicine has alas yet to find a cure).

Off Martin dutifully goes. Martin dutifully going off to do Ben’s bidding is, we will learn, very much the pattern of their relationship. At school he was even nicknamed Little Shadow by Ben’s sister, Phoebe – aha! – and has been known, slightly effortfully, as LS by them all ever since. He must be the world’s most compromised political journalist. I hope no one ever finds out.

There is an investigative journalist called Amara Baines at the party (house), which is what happens when you don’t vet people’s plus-ones properly. But I’m sure she won’t be so rude as to take advantage of the situation while she’s here.

The Party is enormous fun: pacey, moreish, perfectly cast. Lindsay Duncan as Ben’s calmly furious grieving mother is a standout, but everyone is great – and the scene in which the women verbally eviscerate Jarvis’s fragile wife to help scupper his plans, like lions in beaded gowns gutting a gazelle, is exquisitely awful.

There are a few moments when you think it’s about to go completely off the rails (the hologram of Phoebe singing in the family pile’s basement, created by her art college friends, foremost among them), but it never quite does, despite the enormous speed it builds up. There’s no one to root for, no one to invest in – they’re all absolutely awful, and you can just go along for the ride. (Lucy, the exception, remains a cipher.) Whose blood is on Martin’s shirt? Why is he in such thrall to the Fitzmaurices? Don’t know, don’t care, but just desperately want to know. The story’s the thing and it’s a doozy.