Review of The Engagement Party at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Oldham.
It feels good to be heading to Oldham for a night out. The tram ride out from Victoria used to be a regular feature of my cultural life. Then the Coliseum closed, and I’ve not been back to the town centre on an evening since.
After a few false starts, the theatre company feels back on a firmer footing with a programme of performances scheduled in at local venues and work underway to reopen their historic Fairbottom Street building before the end of this year.
The Engagement Party is Oldham Coliseum’s first major in-house production in its new incarnation. Amanda Huxtable responsible for Bread and Roses, one the Coliseum’s best shows in recent years, is on board as creative director, and we’re promised “a perfect mix of Coronation Street and Britain’s Got Talent”.
Brightly coloured drapes soften the edges of the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s immense concrete walls, and the audience are seated together at tables. There’s a wonderfully warm welcome front of house, and a lot of goodwill in the room as people settle in – and then the ‘party’ begins, and it’s not long before I start to wish my invitation had got lost in the post.
The production is in a constant battle with the venue’s tricky acoustics. In the first half in particular, chunks of dialogue evaporate inaudibly – it’s hard to know what is going on.
The room layout doesn’t help – there’s so much dead space. Banqueting tables are overlarge, unsociable, with lots of sterile white tablecloth glaring at you. The audience are pushed to the perimeter to create room for a couple of big set pieces – but for most of the time, a handful of characters wander back and forwards through all that emptiness. A top table, the focus for so many community events, sits underused.
It is just about graspable that guests are gathering for an engagement party, and there’s some unease because the happy couple are nowhere to be seen.
Presumably, that’s the reason the live band make such frequent interventions.
A friend WhatsApps me after the show to say the Queen Elizabeth Hall was designed for music not speech, and members of Manchester’s The Untold Orchestra sound glorious – creating warm, emotional, all-embracing moments within that cavernous space.
Unfortunately, their sterling efforts to get the party started, mean the drama on stage keeps stopping – and, as a result, never really gets going until after the interval.
By the time a fight breaks out between the guests, it is hard to actually understand why – especially when a character claims to have overheard a derogatory comment from someone sat 20 metres away. In this venue? With this sound mix? Seriously?
The building is what it is, but the production’s biggest Achilles heel is afshan d’souza-lodhi’s shell of a play. Two young people meet and fall in love. Six months later, they throw a lavish engagement party just as doubts have set in about their relationship. Characters lack depth. What narrative there is has little in the way of dramatic pull, and it’s a struggle to feel invested in such thinly drawn lives.
A layer of story-telling about fate, and a group of well-intentioned ancestors (or Elders) offering an unseen guiding hand to the play’s earthly characters, offers something a bit different but feels similarly underdeveloped.
Samir Arrian as the most recently deceased, and youngest of the Elders, movingly reminisces about all the ordinary things in life that he misses before becoming caught up in thoughts of what might have been. Earlier, older Elder (Andrea Crewe) reflects briefly but eloquently on the nature of community and belonging.
Moments of connection such as these feel few and far between.
A large and lively cast, including a wonderfully committed group of community actors, work tirelessly hard to keep the production’s energy levels up.
It’s frustrating to see so much of that skill and enthusiasm expended on filler and faffing around. Why bring actors of the calibre of Noor Hadid and Sid Akbar on board and give them so little to work with?
At times, it feels like theatre that doesn’t trust live theatre to be enough. Julie Hesmondhalgh phones in a performance (presumably pre-recorded), offering the engaged couple bland Hallmark-style thoughts on love.
The show’s best scene, where Zack (Connor Darren-James) and Sofia (Marucia Ferreira) first meet each other in a chicken shop – nicely-paced, funny, touching – is on film.
Shot locally, it’s a brief glimpse of the town that feels so absent from The Engagement Party. Its characters talk about Oldham in the blandest of terms – their connection, how they miss it when they’re away, as somewhere they’re “supposed to be”. Yet, they never go beyond that – the play makes no effort to understand or represent the town, it all feels so rootless. I’m not looking for parochialism, just some sense of place – a taste of what makes Oldham special.
Instead, the fare at this engagement party is flavourless. We are served up a world where characters hang around in chicken shops, use Ubers, and pray to their deceased elders for advice. It could be anywhere.
The Engagement Party runs from 18 to 22 February 2025 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Oldham.
Performance seen on 19 February 2025.
Images by Chris Payne.
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