Writer: Nancy Farino
Director: Tessa Walker
Jason Thorpe is mesmerising as the self-delusional life coach Winston Smith in Nancy Farino’s impressive debut play. Much more fun than his Orwellian namesake, Winston is full of life, games and joie de vivre when he appears unannounced at his daughter’s house, driving an old school bus. He convinces her to travel to Ireland with him in search of family he never knew he had. He’s just discovered that his father had other children, and so he needs to go to the source of his lineage. On the surface, Fatherland is a theatrical road movie.
But underneath its comedy, Farino’s play is concerned with the sins of the father. His daughter Joy (performed by Farino) struggles to live up to her name. She’s depressed, her mother is being treated for breast cancer, and she has just split up with her boyfriend – indeed, she only refers to him as “him”, as if mentioning his name would bring up too much pain. She also has bad dreams about tragic gods, untended babies, and, in another 1984 allusion, rats. Joy tries to refuse her father’s request to accompany him to Mayo, but his cheerfulness is a force of nature that is impossible to defy.
So unremittingly positive is Winston that the audience must wonder whether he is in the middle of a bipolar manic episode, but as the father and daughter begin their journey, it seems as if Winston is always like this. He jumps between careers as often as he jumps between women. After his marriage to Joy’s mother, there have been plenty of other women, one whose name he always forgets. Joy supplies the neglected name.
Their bus journey is inventively staged by Tessa Walker on the traverse stage of Hampstead’s Downstairs Theatre. Rolling around on car seats with wheels, Winston and Joy begin their road trip, with a CD player, full of pop hits from Shania Twain to The Weather Girls, in the middle. It’s snowing outside: Joy is wrapped up while Winston wears shorts, a nod to his eternal manchild persona.
However, there’s also another narrative, deftly integrated into the story of the bus trip. Winston is being sued by the family of one of his clients, and scenes show him being interviewed by a lawyer. At first, she is coolly efficient as she is working for the Big Brother state, although as the meetings progress, Shona Babayemi gives the lawyer a quiet humanity. Nevertheless, she is driven by revenge rather than by the pursuit of justice. It is in these scenes that the audience begins to realise what an awful life coach Winston is. His practice appears to be based on mantras straight off YouTube.
While the ending of the interview segments is easy to predict, it’s not entirely clear how this glimpse into Winston’s work fits in with the story of driving to Ireland. And if the audience is to blame Winston for Joy’s mental health, then who is to blame for Winston’s bad, hedonistic choices? Farino gives us no details about Winston’s father apart from the fact that he had secret children.
Nevertheless, Fatherland is finely acted, and Farino’s script is intelligent, never making too much of its literary references. Perhaps it’s a little too long – the lawyer’s interviews could reveal Winston’s trouble sooner – but it certainly feels authentic and offers a new way to look at parental responsibility.
Runs until 29 November 2025
