“All creative people feel like an outsider in some way”: Sarah Solemani and Lydia Leonard on ITV’s The Party

When ITV’s political thriller The Party was first announced, the show’s writer, Sarah Solemani, who also stars as Lucy, said: “Class, sex, shame, power, betrayal, secrets – stunned ITV are letting me air my dirty laundry for our new show.”

Based on Elizabeth Day’s novel of the same name, the five-part drama follows Martin Gilmour (Luke Evans), an outsider who has spent years orbiting the privileged world of his university best friend Ben Fitzmaurice (Tom Cullen). But when Martin attends a lavish party at Ben’s family home, long-held secrets and resentments begin to surface, threatening the lives they have carefully constructed.

It’s something I ask Solemani about ahead of the show’s release: what was it about those themes in particular that drew her to bringing Day’s book to life on screen?

“I was very compelled by the class element of the story,” she tells Stylist. “The British class system is one of the most enduring social power hierarchies of the Western world, if not the world. We’re very good at making jokes about it and being funny about it. But underneath it, there’s something that can be examined. I think during Covid, we realised that the kind of class of people we thought have our best interests at heart actually weren’t suitable to govern us.”

Credit: ITV

Reading Simon Kuper’s 2022 book Chums: How A Tiny Caste Of Oxford Tories Took Over The UK also informed her writing and approach to the series. “It’s funny, but it’s quite alarming in how it looks at the 1980s Oxford group of politicians. How they became the architects of Brexit and why they went into politics, not necessarily to improve a lot of British people’s lives, but to further their own political careers that they felt they were entitled to. I feel like we are due a post-mortem of our country and the way we’re governed.”

When it came to writing the show against that political backdrop, Solemani explains that the story ultimately became deeply personal, centred on Martin and his attempts to navigate a class system in which he never quite feels at home. “He can’t run away from his shame, and he needs to break free,” she says. “But he can only break free by dismantling his life. By the end, there’s a sort of degree of liberation, so all of that really drew it to me.”

As well as writing the show, Solemani plays Martin’s pregnant wife, Lucy, who went to Oxford with Martin and Ben.

“I related to that outsider,” Solemani says. “I think all creative people feel like an outsider in some way, and it was an interesting relationship [between Lucy and Martin]. You learn pretty quickly that Martin loves someone else, but there is a love there. I don’t think it was particularly physical, even though she’s pregnant, but there was some connection. And even though they have challenges, it appealed to me to look into what Lucy saw in Martin and the way she had to almost endure his friends and a world where she didn’t really connect.”

Lydia Leonard in The Party

For Lydia Leonard, who plays Ben’s wife, Serena Fitzmaurice, it was the seductive world of the production as a whole that proved irresistible. “It’s all very seductive, like it is to Martin. This particular echelon of people, much as they’re quite loathsome in the story at times… they do look like they’re having a lot of fun, and that’s quite seductive. Until things begin to unravel, Serena is handling everything: she’s throwing this fabulous party, and she’s an extremely able, bright person. But she has just churned out four babies in a row and is using her ample brainpower just to run the house and to push her husband’s career.”

Before long, however, the façade begins to crumble, and Serena’s seemingly picture-perfect life starts to unravel. “Everyone’s hiding some dark, dark secrets, but also denying their true selves,” says Leonard. “There’s a quote in episode one that says, ‘If you deny, it kills you in the end,’ and Serena is suppressing an awful lot in order to live the chosen life that she was bred to do. And that begins to surface and unravel as things gradually fall apart.”

Credit: ITV

Feeling like an outsider

Through Martin’s eyes, The Party ultimately draws a sharp distinction between being invited into a room and truly feeling as though you belong there – something Solemani shares a personal affinity with.

“I went to Cambridge, and the only reason I got in was because there was a Ghanaian anthropologist called Dr Sue Benson, who had a reputation for taking wildcard girls. All of us were from state schools; we were not good on paper, we didn’t have instruments or languages, and we definitely didn’t have sport. But she saw something in us and gave me the opportunity to study politics.

Credit: ITV

“I was intimidated; I felt out of my depth; I saw people in the union debating, and I’d never seen a debate. My grades weren’t great, but she took me aside and said, ‘You’ve got to come to my house every week, and you’ve got to study harder. You’ve got to work harder because you’re not getting the right grades.’

“She said, ‘It’s very macho out there; you’ve got to really work hard.’ So I had to go every week. She taught me how to argue the way that public school boys were arguing, how to make my argument in an essay and how to win over the reader with conviction.

“Then she sadly passed away in my last year before I graduated. I owe my degree and my lifelong learning to her, because that was not a room that was calling me in; it was a room that she pulled me into herself.”

For viewers already intrigued by the secrets bubbling beneath the surface, Solemani teases: “Each episode has a lot of dramatic surprises that the audience will hopefully be gripped by, but it really gets kind of insane, dark and twisted in episode four.” Consider us already seated for the drama to begin.