Every Christmas, a small theatrical miracle takes place in Oldham thanks to the local youth theatre, Oldham Theatre Workshop. 

‘Oh,’ you might think. ‘A youth theatre? How nice, but really?’ But the team at OTW are no slouches in the theatrical arena, playing to packed houses at the library year after year.

For 2025, it’s Hansel & Gretel, helmed by OTW’s director James Atherton who is also a highly respected musical director and composer. He writes regularly for the New Vic at Stoke, and composed the music for its co-production with the Royal Exchange of Around the World in 80 Days which toured the UK and went to Broadway, and is being revived next year (don’t miss it). Meanwhile, workshop leader Sarah Nelson is a prolific and accomplished writer. Her play Letter to Boddah, a dark and hilarious ride through the lives of two young white working-class men, won the Broadway Baby award for Best Theatre Show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019. And when Nelson turns her talent to Christmas shows, they are sometimes dark, always hilarious, and always celebratory of every kind of family life.

Hansel & Gretel lives up to its pedigree. A hilarious take on how society sees children as a nuisance, two snake-oil salesmen straight from the Old West (a terrifying Matthew Ganley and his sidekick, a meeker Faz Shah) turn up in town peddling an elixir which guarantees to make whoever takes it do as they’re told. Parents, desperate to make their children behave, queue up, but so does OTW alumnus Sophie Ellicott, giving a terrific wicked stepmother who wants to get rid of her stepchildren entirely.

Back at home, everyone is hungry. Dad, a delightful Charlie Ryan as a lovely but somewhat feckless woodsman, is failing to provide, but everyone is making do. OTW alumnus Adil Mohammed as Hansel takes entirely after his father in the fecklessness stakes, although he does have the bright idea about the stones – more anon – and Megan Hickie is a much cleverer Gretel, but still a girl, you see, so hopeless, really. I jest, she saves the day. But you’ll have to wait till the end to find out how.

Stepmum has tried to persuade dad to dump the kids, I mean, life would be so much better without them, just take them into the forest and dump them, they’ll be fine; but he just won’t part with them. So she slips the elixir to him in his tea, and he is hers to command.

They lead the children into the dark, scary wood where Stepmum plans to abandon them. But Hansel has left a trail of stones which lead back to the house, only night has fallen and he can’t see them. Comfort arrives in the form of a hedgehog, a mouse and a fox – Messrs Ganley, Ellicott, and Ryan giving great animal – and then the Moon, an avuncular Shah, sheds light on everything, including the stones. Safe home.

Or so they think. Stepmum has elixir to spare and off they go again, wise this time to the stone trick, and sure enough H&G are abandoned in the wood, where, starving, they smell out a house made of gingerbread, and a charming old lady who lives there, and yes! It is the wicked witch, Ellicott again giving a very different but equally horrid wickedness, and then, well, you’ll just have to go and see it.

There are lots of songs, so many it’s practically Sondheim, and everyone sings beautifully, accompanied by Atherton on keys and Shah, an Oldham Music Service and RNCM alumnus, on violin. The songs carry a lot of the story, and are clever and funny and, most importantly, the children in the audience ‘get’ them.

Which neatly segues me to the audience. OTW’s library shows have an audience that any other theatre in the country would die for. It’s largely working class, and on the day I went, largely Muslim. The age range starts at about six months. There were babes in arms, lots of women in hijabs, and two women in niqabs. In 60 years of theatregoing I have never seen a woman in a niqab in any other theatre in the land.

I spoke of a small miracle. Despite ticking loads of Arts Council England boxes about community and diversity, not to mention actual Art, this production receives no money from ACE whatsoever. Actually, that’s not quite true. This year there is important money from the Oldham Coliseum fund, which has helped raise production values and funds a tour of the show to ten schools in the most deprived areas of the borough. Otherwise, OTW is entirely funded, as it has been for its entire 57 years, by Oldham Borough Council. That in itself is a miracle, particularly given the current constraints on councils’ funding.

And despite the tiny size of the auditorium – it seats 100 and you have to cross the stage to go to the toilet – and deliberately low ticket prices, the production breaks even because, despite the appalling library website, it usually sells out.

Do go and see it, you’ll have a lovely time. You have until Christmas Eve. You can park in the Sainsbury’s car park – it’s free for three hours – and about five minutes’ walk from the library front door as building work means you have to go via the main road.

If there’s a theatre company looking for a Christmas show for next year, Hansel & Gretel is available!

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

Main image by James Atherton

 

Hansel & Gretel is at Oldham Library & Lifelong Learning Centre until December 24, 2025. For more information, click here.