Party Season at Lowry

Party Season arrives at Lowry as a new comedy that turns the chaos of modern parenting into something sharp, silly and all too recognisable. Unfolding across three children’s parties in one weekend, it drops us into a world of overstimulated kids, underslept adults and some of the more absurd truths of being a parent.

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 necking olives and pretending everything’s under control. Even before anyone arrives, the group chat has set the tone – dietary requirements, weirdly specific gift stipulations, overworked politeness. It’s a world the play mines for comedy, right down to its subtitle: Whatever You Do, Don’t Join the WhatsApp Group.

We follow Xander, who is back in town and on parenting duty. What begins as a manageable run of family social obligations soon starts to wobble. As he moves from one party to the next, old grudges resurface, class identities collide and the effort of keeping up appearances for the kids becomes harder to sustain. With tension rising like a helium balloon, Xander finds himself caught between the person he used to be and the version of adulthood he is apparently meant to have settled into.

That setup gives Party Season plenty to play with beyond the immediate comic possibilities of sugared-up children and frazzled parents. Beneath the party games, bubbles and polite smiles, something else begins to show – the odd theatre of adult behaviour in these settings. It’s here that the humour sharpens, zeroing in on those small, absurd moments that no one prepares you for before you have kids.

That mix of silliness and something more pointed is very much what The Wardrobe Ensemble do best. The company’s best-known work, including Education, Education, Education and The Last of the Pelican Daughters, has built a reputation for being funny, inventive and unexpectedly moving. Party Season sounds cut from the same cloth – fun, observant, and alive to the pressures that come with modern parenthood.