Party Season at Lowry

There’s a strange choreography to children’s parties – one the adults tend to follow more carefully than the kids. Picture it: the small people more or less feral in the ball pit, a vaguely disconcerting entertainer blowing bubbles, the grown-ups awkwardly mingling, performing ease. Even before anyone arrives, the WhatsApp group has already set the tone – dietary requirements, weirdly specific gift stipulations, overworked social niceties.

Party Season arrives at Lowry with a knowing subtitle that already understands the territory: Whatever You Do, Don’t Join the WhatsApp Group. The new play, by Bristol company The Wardrobe Ensemble, is a comedy rooted in the bizarre truths of parenting, but one that also taps into the social pressures and class tensions sitting beneath these odd social spaces.

The play unfolds across three kids’ parties in one weekend. We follow Xander, who’s back in town and on parenting duty. As he navigates the parties, class identities collide and ancient grudges start to pierce the social niceties. With tension rising like a helium balloon, he finds himself caught between the person he used to be and the version of adulthood he is apparently meant to have settled into.

Beyond the immediate comic possibilities of overstimulated children and underslept parents, Party Season has plenty to work with – not least the odd theatre of adult behaviour, and the way class, status and identity assert themselves in supposedly harmless, celebratory spaces.

That balance between silliness and something more pointed is very much where The Wardrobe Ensemble excel. The company’s best-known work, including Education, Education, Education and The Last of the Pelican Daughters, has been widely praised for blending irreverence with real emotional weight. Party Season sounds cut from similar cloth – observant, funny and alive to the pressures the come with modern parenthood.