Fatherland
Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

STYLISH, slick and totally engaging, this exploration of father-and-son relationships grabs the audience from the outset.

Its visuals and sounds are a collage of impressions recorded from a series of interviews with men from the creators’ home towns of Corby, Stockport and Kidderminster and Simon Stephens’s script, jointly created with director Scott Graham and composer Karl Hyde, cleverly sets the play within the context of its development and questions its own premise, validity and even its title.

The interwoven interviews blend the mundane, funny and painful. Recollections of growing up are interlaced with violence and deaths alongside, literally, soaring moments of parental elation. The unarticulated nature of many father-and-son relationships is explored, highlighted and refined within the context of life in the post-industrial towns.

A cast of 13 men and large male chorus create a dynamic world of movement and memorable tableaux, with the integrated scenes on a large rotating stage isolated in a black, haze-filled space lit by spotlights and banks of sharp white lights.

Karl Hyde’s music perfectly complements the movement, highlighting and intensifying phrases and thoughts from the largely working-class accounts of relationships and manhood with football-style chants, harmonies and rhythmic solos.

What is usually overlooked for being commonplace and unexceptional is illuminated so that a father’s coat becomes a world of backs seen through the eyes of a son trailing behind his parent and the unasked, unanswered or unarticulated questions from sons to fathers transform into chants engulfing the audience.

This intense production does not offer any obvious insights into such a key relationship. There's no universality, except in the sense of how much goes unexpressed, and the shared and individual experiences of sons and fathers seem unified only in the questions posed and not the answers.

It is the individual narrative that ends the production— of a father forgiven by his child for swearing at them — which seems to hold significance.

Runs until June 23, box office: lyric.co.uk.