Imagine a cosy, suburban sitcom from the '70s, rewritten by Ricky Gervais, and you have Abigail's Party.

It is the kind of comedy you watch with your hand over your face, through splayed fingers. It makes you cringe, but it is compelling.

Best known as a BBC Play for Today, Abigail's Party is frequently found in lists of the most memorable television programmes ever made.

Gervais acknowledges it was an early influence on his own writing, saying he was "blown away" by the first broadcast of Mike Leigh's breakthrough drama in 1977.

Before it found a mass audience, and a place in TV history, Abigail's Party was a smash hit at the Hampstead Theatre.

Fellow director Richard Eyre described it as "social horror", saying it was one of the funniest and most terrifying things he had ever seen.

Abigail's Party has been revived frequently on both the professional and amateur stage. Thirty years on, it is something of a period piece, but it still has the power to make audiences simultaneously laugh and squirm in their seats.

The plot is straightforward enough: Beverly and her estate-agent husband give a drinks party in their suburban home. Their guests are Angela, a nurse, and her taciturn ex-footballer husband, Tony, who have recently moved to the neighbourhood.

They are joined by Susan, a shy divorcee, whose fifteen-year-old daughter, the unseen Abigail, is having a party.

Beverly's party begins amicably enough, helped along by a well-stocked bar, but rapidly descends into awkward conversation, social embarrassment and arguments. The noise of the teenagers' party becomes increasingly more intrusive...

Abigail's Party is a suburban comedy of bad manners and a tragedy about marital conflict among the aspirant middle classes. Social faux pas go hand in hand with rocky relationships against a cheesy '70s soundtrack.

However much gin Beverly pours down her throat and those of her guests, she can't quite numb the unhappiness going on in her living room or drown the sound of The Clash and The Sex Pistols snarling a few doors away.

Acquisitive, proud, proto-Thatcherites Beverly and Laurence may be (Thatcher herself, in 1977, was two years away from election victory), but the punky sound of revolution is what triumphs here, sticking up two fingers at the prevailing orthodoxy going through its death throes. Ultimately, it is Abigail's Party, not Beverly's.

When the play was televised by the BBC, Dennis Potter reacted strongly against it, seeing it as "a prolonged jeer ... about the lower middle classes".

Our director Simon Roberts thinks Leigh may well be critiquing the world of the play – suburbia as something repressive, boring, squeaky-clean and bourgeois – but believes that the characters within it are flawed human beings, trapped by social expectation, in whom audiences should be able to recognise something of themselves.

He has assembled an experienced cast of actors – Jananne Rahman, Simon Higginson, Juliet Vaughan Turner, Myles Brown and Lisa Day – to bring us a vintage dose of Leigh.