★★★★☆
Four Stars
There was perhaps an unfair weight of expectation on my part towards this production of Our Fathers at Summertown’s North Wall Arts Centre – anything that requires me to venture further than a ten-minute walk away from the concrete towers of St. Catherine’s has to work extremely hard in order to make me feel my journey was worthwhile.
Within moments of the play’s unobtrusive opening sequence, however, any grumbles regarding our distance from Arne Jacobsen’s architectural masterpiece were swiftly and permanently forgotten; what was to follow was an hour of the most original, unpredictable and genuinely moving theatre I’d seen in a long time.
Our Fathers isn’t exactly subtle in how it grabs its audience’s attention — having a dancer brandish a sign bearing the legend “THIS CONCERNS ALL OF YOU” within its first five minutes is certainly an effective way of bludgeoning down the fourth wall. Yet this arresting message comes as just one in a sequence of slogans patchworked together from famous speeches and popular culture, meaning the relationship with the audience is subsumed into just another choreographed routine for ballet dancer Bert.
Throughout the play, the themes and poignancies that CONCERN ALL OF US are similarly approached through each character’s idiosyncratic personal experiences. The ‘action’ centres on the choice faced by the semi-fictionalized version of actor Mike Tweddle: that of whether to father the child of his dead dad’s friend’s daughter (keeping up?) despite the fact that he’s never met her. This is understandably causing tension with his boyfriend Bert; in the meantime, their vivacious flatmate Sofia is trying to escape the shadow of her father in an attempt to find a partner of her own.
The production never lets you get too comfortable as passive spectators — Sofia literally ‘dates’ several members of the audience over the course of the play, snuggling up to various men with an increasingly intimate accompaniment of popcorn, red wine, and post-coital bedsheet. Yet the play’s strength lies in its ability to use such comic audience participation — alongside the various different media of dance, video and music — without ever seeming gimmicky.
Sofia’s overbearing father is rendered brilliantly through shadow-play, taking such an exaggerated form that he is more cartoon character than actual person. The classic trope of your father ‘living in you’ is invoked in the Skype conversation in which Bert plays both father and son, one of the standout sequences of the play. Without ever moving from his chair, Bert repeatedly transforms himself so skilfully that it feels like you’re watching two different actors on stage. And, using only the simple combination of a projector and a home video, we see Mike get to dance with his father in the most gorgeously moving sequence of the whole production.
Though the use of real-life material (home videos and diaries) lends the play undeniable emotional power, the production itself is carried by the outstanding performances of Mike Tweddle, Bert Roman and Sofia Paschou; the combined force of their individual stellar performances makes Our Fathers a piece of genuine must-see theatre.
