Fatherland, Lyric Hammersmith, London, review: Simon Stephens, Scott Graham and Karl Hyde have made a genuinely compelling hybrid

This show blends verbatim theatre, group movement, and an immersive soundtrack to explore experiences of fatherhood

His dad was in Saudi Arabia for a few years, working in the construction industry, so Alan did not see much of him during his childhood. They had their first proper time together when Alan was 16 and went out to visit him for a week. His old man took him to see someone being stoned to death. (“It was probably, um, a bit of adultery or something like that... It never shocked me. Didn’t bother me.”)

Alan went into construction too and – like father, like son – apparently became a believer in white superiority. England, he claims, is “PC mental” and is going to be “f****d basically” by these liberal attitudes to Muslims, immigrants and religious rights.

This 54-year-old man is one of the people interviewed in Fatherland, a powerful, flawed, but singularly affecting collaboration between playwright Simon Stephens, director and co-founder of the physical theatre group Frantic Assembly, Scott Graham, and musician Karl Hyde, of Underworld.

Returning together to their respective home towns of Stockport, Corby and Kidderminster, they conducted interviews with old acquaintances as well as strangers about their relationships with their fathers and the experience of being fathers themselves. They have edited these interviews down to a 90-minute piece that – pooling their talents – exhilaratingly integrates verbatim theatre, group movement, immersive soundtrack, and breaks into near-song or tribal chant.

The men, who intersect and overlap, are a diverse bunch. One them never knew his dad; another brought up his kids alone when his wife left him; another feels that his bouts of mental illness are impossible for his father to accept, and so on.

The emotional inhibition that prevents many British fathers and sons from saying that they love one another is scarcely a new perception. But the show finds fresh and haunting ways of expressing this. Ascending a telescopic ladder that rises through the stage, fireman Mel tells the grisly story of having to deal with the remains of a man who had been left alone to melt into his bedclothes. His sons only realised that something was wrong when they made a rare Christmas Eve visit.

Some phrases from the spoken dialogue become sung mantras or the germ of a stirring chorale. At one point, the voices of the 13-strong cast, who perform on a rusty revolving platform in Jon Bausor’s post-industrial design, are resonantly redoubled by a crowd of singers who pour into the stalls and circle. They add their vocal weight to the massed melodic chant: “There’s a lot I’d like to know, a lot I’d like to know.”

This is primarily freighted with the wish that we could hear what our fathers were really thinking. But for Luke, the interviewee who becomes sceptical about the entire project, it’s thrown down as a challenge to the show’s creators, who are played by actors and onstage throughout. What do they think they are up to in descending from the metropolis onto these towns? Why verbatim theatre? What is the difference between editing material and falsifying it? What about them and their fathers?

I thought that this was the clunkiest strand in the proceedings. I wondered if Luke would eventually ask: “Have you made me up as clunky way of incorporating your self-doubts?” As a conscience figure, he certainly allows the creators to have their cake and eat it.

Having asserted that the show is not about them – “that would feel self-indulgent” – they proceed to take it over with testimonies that prove too unforgettable in their pain and obvious candour, particularly Stephens’s memories of his alcoholic salesman-father, who died young and is the reason why he writes.

The piece, which premiered at last year’s Manchester International Festival, is so good at its best, it justifies all the rather contrived hand-wringing. It’s a genuinely compelling hybrid, and this London transfer is to be welcomed and recommended.

Until 23 June (lyric.co.uk)