The Coliseum roared back to life Friday night, not on Fairbottom Street where scaffolding still surrounds the historic venue, but three miles away at Oldham’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, where 200 guests found themselves suddenly cast as wedding guests at the most ambitious community production the theatre has ever mounted.

“The Engagement Party” crashed through the fourth wall before audiences even reached their seats, as actors playing nosy aunties cornered them with gossip while uncles pressed cups of punch into their hands and cousins hijacked selfies. By the time Zach (Connor Darren James) and Sofia (Marucia Ferreira) burst through the doors—late to their own engagement party—the assembled crowd had already lived through two hours of family drama that revealed the couple’s relationship hanging by a thread.

Director Amanda Huxfield’s immersive production transformed the municipal hall into a living, breathing Oldham living room, complete with a four-piece band featuring violin that had even theatre-skeptics tapping their feet between neck-craning moments of drama. Julie Hesmondhalgh, the Coliseum’s most vocal advocate and star of “Mr Bates vs the Post Office,” appeared via video to cheers from the crowd, while local musicians delivered what one guest called “a absolutely cracking soundtrack” that kept pace with the soap-opera revelations unfolding between the two families.

By final curtain, the boundary between audience and actors had dissolved completely—three generations of Oldham residents twirled across the stage-turned-dancefloor as the band launched into an encore. “It’s more party than play,” Huxtable had promised, and she delivered: a love letter to a town where, as she noted, “you can’t go into a shop without someone telling you something,” performed by the very people whose stories it celebrates.

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