‘Bloke-a-homa!’ takes us on a voyage round our fathers
Theatre Fatherland Manchester Royal Exchange
No, not an adaptation of Robert Harris’s alt-history 1992 bestseller based on the premise that the Nazis won the war. This Fatherland is on home turf, taking us to the land of our fathers, that strange, sometimes melancholy world in which emotions are buried and affection lies unspoken, especially between dads and their lads.
We’d like to think we’ve changed – stiff upper lip a thing of the past, everything a bit more Grayson Perry. But the testimonies gathered here into a pioneering piece of music-dancetheatre suggest that, for many, the title of Germaine Greer’s memoir Daddy, We Hardly Knew You still holds true. Our main guides through this complex lair of masculine experience are Simon Stephens, the playwright best known for adapting The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Scott Graham, co-founder of physical theatre company Frantic Assembly, and Karl Hyde, one half of rave duo Underworld.
They went in turn to their home towns – Stockport, Corby and Kidderminster – chatted to and quizzed men, among them relations and old acquaintances, recorded their reminiscences and reflections, whittled all that into a verbatim script, and turned some of the remarks into semi-songs, finding something heartfelt in artless asides.
Opening days after the Donmar’s ambitious but underachieving
Committee, it’s clear there’s a theatrical vogue for trying to find tuneful opportunities in ordinary speech. You could call this “Bloke-a-homa!”. While some of it isn’t easy on the ear (“He was raised in a culture in the Seventies and Eighties…” hardly has the same ring as “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’”), it fits the subject-matter – awkward, tentative, even combative attempts at interaction – well enough.
Is it indulgent? Pretentious? Even exploitative? These are charges incorporated in the script by having three actors play the creative trio, angrily challenged by one participant to justify themselves, who spill their own confessional beans under duress.
In a way, the piece, with its vignettes of dads never met, dads turning to drink, and dads dying alone, confirms there’s nothing new in human nature.
Yet there are moments when clanking industrial sounds, synchronised movements on a versatile metallic stage, and a quality of tribal release, via footbally chants and owl-hooty yelps, echoed around the Royal Exchange’s foyer area, turn conversational loose-change into a rare bonanza of shared experience. I can’t say it changed my life, but I’m very glad I caught it.
Until July 22. Tickets: 0161 833 9833; royalexchange.co.uk. Part of the Manchester International Festival: mif. co.uk