Class
Sue represents the upper middle-class, Beverly and Laurence the aspirational middle middle-class and Tony and Angela the "new arrivals" and lower middle-class. The comedy arises from Beverly's inept attempts to help Angela and Tony, on account of her perceived class superiority, and Sue, on account of the fact that she is (still) married.
Read more about this topic: Abigail's Party
Famous quotes containing the word class:
“There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“Alas for the cripple Practice when it seeks to come up with the bird Theory, which flies before it. Try your design on the best school. The scholars are of all ages and temperaments and capacities. It is difficult to class them, some are too young, some are slow, some perverse. Each requires so much consideration, that the morning hope of the teacher, of a day of love and progress, is often closed at evening by despair.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)