The journey Our Fathers has taken from initial conception to on-stage production has been a long one. It has been four years since Mike Tweddle’s interest in fatherhood, which piqued when he found a box full of his late father’s diaries in 2010, crystallised into a professional ambition.

When I met him and Juan Ayala, the show’s director, outside a café on a leafy suburban street in Summertown, I wanted to find out more about the show’s origins. How had Mike’s personal experiences led to the hour-long production that arrives in Oxford at The North Wall on Saturday?

‘My dad died when I was thirteen, which is quite a critical stage in adolescence, and so I was interested in the theme of absent fatherhood in particular,’ he tells me. ‘How had the disappearance of my dad affected the man I’d become? How is society dealing with the fact that there are a lot of absent fathers out there? I decided that I wanted to bring together a group of artists and explore fatherhood through their own relationships.’

That group of artists consisted of Mike from the UK, Juan from Spain, Bert Roman from Belgium, and Sofia Paschou from Greece – four individuals with different cultural backgrounds and different relationships with their respective fathers.

‘We got a residency in Athens,’ Mike continues. ‘We had two weeks and no plan, but I told everyone we would be working around fatherhood. As soon as we learnt about each other’s fathers, who were such fantastic characters, we realised we had something very emotionally rich to play with.’

The depth of Mike’s personal investment in the project is evident even now. He speaks with a thoughtful, contemplative tone as he becomes absorbed in relating the show’s early history.

‘We started to understand the different challenges that different kinds of men in different contexts face when becoming a father. Challenges related to religion, or class, or tradition. At that time, it was still very therapeutic for me. There was a lot of crying, a lot of fear.’

‘We realised that the three of us [Mike, Bert and Sofia] had relationships that were perhaps more theatrical, that had an element of drama we could explore further. Juan stepped out at that point to direct, to help us transform our own messy personal stories into something an audience could relate to, and we took it from there.’

After sharing initial ideas with audiences in Athens, the show returned to the UK and eventually became an hour-long exploration of the twentieth-century European father, focussing on fictionalised versions of Mike, Bert and Sofia, and presenting slightly dramatised, slightly exaggerated versions of their paternal relationships.

Mike and Bert are a couple considering fathering a child together. Sofia is single and needs to find a man who will live up to her dad’s expectations. Examining fatherhood from different perspectives and embracing issues of sexuality, responsibility and freedom, Our Fathers has received numerous glowing reviews but Mike admits that there were some doubts about the show’s accessibility to begin with.

‘At first, those of us on stage were worried about the audience not being able to engage with the piece’, he reveals, ‘but Juan always had an eye on that. He kept us all in an interesting place between self-indulgence and theatricality. He could see the whole thing from an external perspective and could make sure the audience were always entertained.’

On cue, Juan jumps in to elucidate his directorial vision.

‘After the initial emotion had subsided, it became more of a professional risk than a personal one’, he explains. ‘On a personal level, they [the performers] were all very generous. They shared every detail. They were naked in the rehearsal room.’

 ‘But by then, the issue was whether or not the material worked on stage, in front of an audience. There is truth behind the stories, and I think that gives the show enormous power, but we were always concerned primarily with the audience.’

 ‘The show uses a variety of mediums’, he continues. ‘It’s a mix of stand-up comedy, domestic drama, and dance. There are elements of physical theatre and there is always a degree of improvisation as well. I think it is a very accessible show in that respect.’

Mike interrupts to expand: ‘The variety of mediums comes from a realisation that when you’re digging deep into emotional ties and deep into memories, words just aren’t enough. I think the most moving moments are when image, movement and words combine and hit the point we want to make that the words could not achieve on their own.’

I ask whether either of them think the show has a definite target audience

 ‘None of us are fathers, so we were always looking at fatherhood from a son’s perspective,’ Mike tells me, ‘But we’ve had positive responses from all sorts of people: people considering parenthood, young audiences beginning to understand their parents, gay audiences because of the prominence of alternative parenting.’

‘Ultimately, the show is about love and the way circumstances dictate the ways in which it can be expressed, and I think that’s something everyone can relate to.’

Mike himself is an Oxford alum, having graduated from Wadham in 2003. ‘It would be lovely to have some students come along’, he tells me as I prepare to leave. ‘It’s great for me to come back to Oxford and reconnect with the university. I spent a lot of my time here performing or directing, probably at the expense of my degree.’

We laugh together and I guiltily think about my essay due in tomorrow, a single word of which I’ve yet to write.

★★★★☆

Four Stars

I love Ben Howard’s music. His debut album, Every Kingdom, was magical and vivid and atmospheric. His soft voice brimmed with feeling; it was uplifting – literally – it carried you far from the present moment, soaring through the beautiful world the lyrics beguiled into being.

I Forget Where We Were is very different in tone and emphasis, though no less accomplished. This time, the songs’ focal point is downwards, sinking through dark, reverberating strings; the choruses expanding outwards rather than up, weighted down, perhaps, by the predominant emotion of the record: grief.

It is, without a shadow of doubt, built on loss and heartbreak. From the single ‘End of the Affair’: “Living without her / Living at all / Seems to slow me down / Living forever / Hell, I don’t know / Do I care, do I care?” to highlight of the album ‘In Dreams’ with refrain, “I live alone now, I live alone in life without you here” the lyrics tell of being trapped in loneliness, and of a disillusionment with the heady summersaulting happiness of Every Kingdom.

You can hear traces of the Ben Howard of old in stand-out tracks ‘She Treats Me Well’ and ‘Let’s Go Dancing’, but here too, the enmeshing harmonies echo with a forlorn weariness. The familiar acoustic deftness at the forefront of ‘In Dreams’ is enveloped by lo-fi electric guitar notes in title track ‘I Forget Where We Were’ and desperate finale ‘All Is Now Harmed’.

But the highlight for me is opening track ‘Small Things’ for its hollow but resounding start, withheld at first, filled with air and darkness, but by the end reaching a faster, unyielding plateau of relentless and rippling noise. While equally worth a mention is sleepy and mournful ‘Evergreen’ with the delicately haunting chorus: “Take me back to the catacombs / I am tempted by her love / Bluest eyes against my own skin / I’ve never been so caught up.”

On first listen I was a little unsure, my expectations naturally elevated by Every Kingdom. But after listening to each song several times, I was quickly convinced. Behind the melancholic exterior, I Forget Where We Were offers something enduring and strangely addictive, something that merits a different kind of appreciation from its predecessor, compelling you to listen again and again to try in vain to pinpoint exactly what it might be.

In case the plethora of predictably ham-fisted BBC documentaries and throwaway newspaper inserts somehow haven’t reached you, you should probably be aware that this year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. And to mark the occasion, theatre companies nationwide have been producing shows that use the war as a central motif, either by directly placing events between 1914 and 1918, or by examining the social fallout that inevitably accompanies war.

Despite undeniably good intentions, however, the abundance of these, for want of a better word, ‘commemorative’ plays is beginning to threaten tedium. That war is a fundamentally thought-provoking topic is undeniable; one only has to think of the eternally arresting poetry of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. Yet the predictable, hackneyed nature of the themes that characterise the majority of these plays is similarly patent and, as a device, they seem altogether too obvious a route to the hearts of an audience.

Earlier this year, I saw An August Bank Holiday Lark at the Oxford Playhouse. Set in the fictional village of Greenmill, Deborah McAndrew’s play focuses on the idyllic country life of the early Twentieth Century and its slow demise as a result of the First World War. All the expected characters were present: two young lovers ripped apart by conscription, an elderly father bereft of his two sons, an eager young man deemed unfit for service. I enjoyed the play; it was well-scripted, well-directed and well-acted, but I was left with an immovable anxiety that I had not been as moved as I should have been.

For this, the blame can be partially laid at the door of the media. The bombardment of documentaries, dramas and discussions has rendered me somewhat unable to appreciate the tragedy. There is a genuine danger of desensitisation, of a collective dulling of our perception of the profundity of war through sheer familiarity with it. But this familiarity is also the fault of our theatres.

In the coming weeks, no less than four separate shows about WW1 are being performed in Oxford, including an adaptation of Pat Barker’s Regeneration, which arrives at the OP in 6th week. For the dramatist, war presents situations in which emotion is easily contrived: the loneliness of a young bride awaiting her husband’s return, the fear of a recruit heading to the front-line for the first time, the sorrow of a parent confronted with news of their fallen son. Yet, on stage, are these feelings as perennially profound as we are repeatedly told? “Moving”, “compassionate”, “poignant” boast the posters, but isn’t the proliferation of such productions the very antithesis of such claims? Can these productions, sharing similar themes, similar relationships, similar characters, all be emotionally stirring?

Quality does not always ensure such an outcome, as proved by An August Bank Holiday Lark, a commendable play, in most respects, that I enjoyed seeing but was not deeply moved by. The truth is that in such a climate of commemoration, it is originality that ensures a play has a strong emotional impact on the audience.

In June, I saw a dramatisation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, also at the OP. Yes, it is set in the time of the Second World War but the same, or similar, rules should apply. As a play, the lack of centrality, a fundamental component of the novel, ensures that the audience is never fully immersed. As an eyeglass into the harrowing trauma of conflict, however, its fervent unpredictability rendered it surprisingly touching.

It is the revelation of a new perspective on well-worn stories that truly engages an audience. It is the inclusion of an unusual character or an alternative opinion. These are devices that break fresh ground. They circumvent the prism of mass-media opinions, blow away the haze of familiarity and promote tangible insight into the tragedy. And they are much needed in First World War drama, lest we forget.