There was robust debate over a glass of pop following press night of Royal & Derngate’s latest Made in Northampton play, on whether you had to have had kids to truly ‘get’ it.
Two of my fellow audience members, without offspring, of course recognised the scenarios portrayed about a group of Bristol parents forced together every weekend by the birthday parties of their various pre-school and primary-age children. After all, the one thing that unites us all is that we were once kids. But did those of us who had first hand-experience of having to respond to cries of ‘Mummm, can you wipe my bum?’ laugh a little louder, squirm a little more in our seats as each set-up sent us spiralling back into memories of the terror, the anxiety, the utter exhaustion and unbridled joy of child-rearing?
As mother to four kids, all now well past the age of the incessant children’s parties of their primary school years, I absolutely recognised the characters on stage – adults who wouldn’t choose to hang out so much, but made to by their children’s various and ever-changing friendship groups.
There’s overbearing and controlling Head of the PTA Celia (Jessie Meadows) with her shiny Aga, Strava-obsessed husband David (Ben Vardy) and bratty child Aonghus (Jacade Simpson). Then laid-back Bea (Fowzia Madar), who gets even the most feral five-year-olds in line with a ten second song and ‘shush’. Her brother Kane (also played by Jacade Simpson, and making good use of the in-joke) is the non-parent in the group – and his detailing of his child-free life could have been a song from a musical, with the parents’ desperate envy clearly and hilariously on show.
Tom England plays Xander (above), the teeny-weenie beanie wearing prodigal dad, returning to his own childhood home after the inevitable exodus from London to the provinces, which he clearly resents. Meanwhile his partner Margot (Kerry Lovell) is away presenting at a conference, desperate to catch up with her PhD that’s been put on hold while she’s done most of the child-rearing for son Felix’s first five years. All he’s got to do is take his kid to a few parties and arrange his own son’s do, how hard could it be? Cue slapstick bad-dadding, with Xander being perpetually haunted by the memory of his late dad, a groan-worthy 70s’-style children’s magician called Neil Terntainer (James Newton) much beloved of everyone but him.
Lovell also plays Simone, a darkly funny and mostly monosyllabic mum, appearing ominously (helped by excellent staging and lights) clutching her newborn second child and drifting around in a fugue state. While the show’s references are all pretty recognisable and in my long-past years, it’s her unexpected monologue that actually broke me. One line. Just one, about who we are after motherhood, that made my nose fizz and the lump rise in my throat. Bravo Kerry, you got me.
The show bowls along at a frantic place (with no interval), as per Wardrobe Ensemble’s other work, and as the cast members sometimes play the kids (on their knees to show the height difference) the audience needs a little orientation time to work out who’s playing whom and whether they’re in a house, in a fantasy reality or exchanging messages in the dreaded parents’ Whatsapp group.
It’s all good fun, underpinned by the more thought-provoking politics of gentrification, class snobbery and whether parenting really is a shared responsibility. Parenting carries a lot of trauma, but also forms our adult selves more than we could ever understand and there’s a lot to be said for the cliché that it takes a village to raise a child. We might not choose that village, but we definitely need its residents.
As well as the obvious thoughts of the childhoods of my now adult children, Party Season made me reflect on my decade or more years writing parenting columns on a weekly basis for the local paper, particularly the letter that one woman wrote (yes, on actually paper in an envelope with a stamp. I mostly avoided social media and below the line comment abuse). She had taken the trouble to tell me in great detail how she was glad her children weren’t friends with mine, having seen a page I’d written about how there was no need to buy expensive branded party bags and that a freezer bag filled with sweets and a bit of cake in a serviette was fine. Her main beef, as well as the neglect of not providing branded plastic tat, was that the photo showed a party of one of my sons, aged about five, with a homemade (not by me) cake and cartons of Ribena on the table. This, she said, showed I really didn’t care about my kids…
I’d like to think that I’d let it go, all these years later. But still occasionally, I wish I’d dropped a branded party poo bag through her door as a token of thanks…
Party Season finishes it’s run at Royal & Derngate tonight but goes on tour if you can catch it elsewhere: The North Wall, Oxford
Tue 28 April – Fri 1 May
www.thenorthwall.com
Worthing Theatres, Worthing
Fri 8 – Sat 9 May
www.wtm.uk
Lowry, Salford
Tue 12 – Sat 16 May 2026
www.thelowry.com
Bristol Old Vic
Thu 21 – Sat 23 May 2026
www.bristololdvic.org.uk
