Emotional trip to find fatherhood

Photo: Manuel Harlan

THE cast of Fatherland in action.

FATHERLAND

Manchester International Festival, Royal Exchange Theatre, to July 22

IT must have seemed a good idea at the time as a huge chunk of modern theatre is devoted to the lot of women in society, with almost none about what it is to be a father.

So Stockport playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly theatre company co-founder Scott Graham, from Corby, and musician Karl Hyde from Kidderminster, started with the father figures they knew best, their own, which also set them off on journeys to rediscover the home towns they left behind for London.

The three devised questions and asked them of more than a dozen volunteers, including parents, grandparents and friends.

The condensed replies are what we see in this Manchester International Festival premiere, where a cast of dozens of 'extras" perform around 13 main characters, three of them the show's creators played by actors.

It's an interesting, sometimes touching, frequently sentimental, exercise about deathbed declarations of love, the need for affection, the desire for the word "love" to be used in conversations with dear old dad, and so on.

Tellingly, Stephens - acted by Ferdy Roberts - suggests, in response to one reluctant subject's belief they are going to put lies in everyone's mouth, that they will simply decide what response they want from the audience, then edit the script and conversations accordingly.

The trouble is that weaving all this stuff around, and the conceit of putting themselves at the heart of the evening, is fairly entertaining but goes nowhere rather quickly.

Even at 90 minutes, director Scott Graham - the real one, not an avatar - has to resort to designer Jon Bausor's brown, minimalist set, with its built-in ladder and door frames (acting as windows, doors and, well, a ladder) to mix things up visually.

There's also a sojourn into a fireman's story, which has little to do with fatherhood, but allows the use of firefighter costumes, clever business with said ladder and a particularly gross story about a body.

All through the evening Karl Hyde's music punctuates and harries the conversations and comes into its own towards the end, when the entire cast treats us to some football-style choral singing that might have some significance to the theme, but mainly seems to be just another interesting treat for the eyes and ears.