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.