"Don’t start throwing the furniture around just because we’ve got the press here!” says Alun Armstrong. His jokey reproach is aimed at Alison Steadman, another of the six lead characters in BBC One’s new one-off drama, The Dinner Party.She has just picked up her garden chair from the patio lined with lavender bushes where we have been sitting in the afternoon sun, and slung it unceremoniously under a nearby gazebo as the heavens open. It’s a typical June day then, though the cast’s spirits are anything but damp.

I have come to the furthest reaches of North London, where a lane lined with multimillion-pound mansions sweeps past a sprawling country park before giving way to what passes for countryside round here.

A BBC film unit is making The Dinner Party, written and directed by Tony Grounds, in a large house at the end of the lane. The house has just been completed by the owner and is worth £5.5 million. The style might be called “traditional blandeur”, complete with wrought-iron gates, Arts and Craftsy gables, a pillared porch and a fountain in the drive. The aura of “new money” has been enhanced indoors with baronial hunting scenes and repro antiques.

In the play, this is the home of the antihero Roger, played with slicked-back hair and a hectoring, estuary accent by Rupert Graves. A former Barnado’s boy turned-City slicker who has made a fortune in mergers and acquisitions, Roger sees himself as king of the unnamed village where the play is set. This is not a working village, of course, but a commuter colony of the type found around all our big cities.

The BBC is anxious to scotch the idea that the play is a 30th anniversary update of Mike Leigh’s 1977 classic Abigail’s Party, which is a bit rich as the BBC seems to have set that particular hare running itself when the drama was first announced. Grounds concedes that the two plays have elements in common. Both are satires on the aspirant attitudes of people who want to climb the social ladder. “I don’t say my characters are ‘working-class’ any more,” says the East End-raised Grounds, “because people assume that means gritty stuff like my Nil By Mouth. I just say ‘ordinary people’.”

The action of both his play and Leigh’s takes place on one evening, almost in “real time”; in this case at a dinner to celebrate Roger’s 43rd birthday. The meal turns into an emotional tag-wrestling bout as the characters subject one another to escalating personal humiliations and embarrassing revelations.

With Steadman, who starred in Abigail’s Party, in the cast, comparisons are bound to be made. Was her character, the much-imitated Beverley, hard to live down? “Only for the first five or ten years,” laughs Steadman. “Then it comes full circle and you realise you are lucky to get a defining role like that . . . The food’s much better this time, mind you.” (Beverley served cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks; Roger’s first course is warm wood-pigeon salad with parmesan in a cabernet sauvignon and walnut oil dressing.)

Elizabeth Berrington, who plays Roger’s wife (who is only ever called “the Shrew”), has also played Beverley in a 2003 stage revival.

Yet although Steadman’s character, Juliet, has a toned-down version of Beverley’s accent and shares some of her vulgar materialism, the two plays are significantly different.

Grounds’s life journey has taken him from Ilford and Billericay to the Hertfordshire village of Wormley West End. What fascinated him was the hierarchy of satellite village life. Roger and the Shrew live on The Avenue. Their badminton partners, failing photocopier salesman Jim (Armstrong) and his dissatisfied wife Juliet (Steadman) have made Jim’s ageing dad (George Cole) sell his house in Leytonstone and are mortgaged up to the hilt so that they can live on the adjoining The Drive. They are joined over dinner by two innocent newcomers, Leo (Lee Evans) and Jackie (Jessie Wallace), who have moved into the down-market The Walk, fleeing the horrors of North London.

“Roger’s influence is very dominant in the village,” says Graves. “He knows everybody’s business and he invites people round because he likes having people dependent on him. He’s a control freak and probably very lonely actually.” He is also something of a psychological sadist and things start going badly wrong when he humiliates the struggling Jim over a vital contract for photocopiers.

Grounds describes the play as “a tragedy of manners. The drama becomes very intense,” he says. “When I was younger I was influenced by plays like Death of a Salesman.”

The characters’ personal crises could easily be seen as typical of the Thatcher-Blair economy with its wildly disparate rewards and pervading insecurities. There’s even a sub-theme of modern neo-slavery, with Roger and Jim employing Poles (“or Lithuanians or whatever they are”) the way previous generations had servants.

All the cast I meet talk about the luxury of getting some proper rehearsal time, at Grounds’s insistence. “I keep telling him it’s like the old days,” says Armstrong, “when he was watching us in his short pants.”

Grounds was brought up on Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke and hates the drift into low-cost, formulaic serials. “Great tel-evision drama is our birthright,” he says. “It’s the BBC’s duty to use it to inspire the next generation.”

The Dinner Party, Sun, BBC One, 9pm

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