The theatrical flagship of this year’s Manchester International Festival is a collaboration between playwright Simon Stephens, director Scott Graham (who to all intents and purposes is now Frantic Assembly) and musician Karl Hyde of Underworld. Returning to their respective home towns of Stockport, Corby and Kidderminster, they interviewed old acquaintances and others about their relationships with their fathers and with their own children (one of the interviewees being Hyde’s father), then edited the results into a 90-minute verbatim play with sections set to music by Hyde.

Verbatim musicals suddenly broke through with the astounding London Road in 2011; Fatherland opens in Manchester bare days after Committee… in the West End. I’d say this isn’t a musical as such, and stress that that’s not being sniffy. Hyde’s score concentrates on looped samples of domestic noise, ironmongery and vocalise such as cries and hums. The instrumental backing rarely offers more than a pulsing rhythm or a sketchy suggestion of a harmonic structure. However, this meshes well with the delivery of ordinary, sometimes banal phrases either by soloists or chorus. Graham’s direction, too, does not use classic Frantics flinging-themselves-around physicality, but rather huddles, scrums, unison swaying, as if the men in question were self-conscious about throwing any kind of shapes.

It impressively mobilises that near-cliché, The Crisis In Masculinity, just as Stephens’ script articulates it, notably by the device of having three of the actors play the central trio onstage, their motives interrogated by an interviewee who turns distrustful. This isn’t a new device in verbatim theatre, but it is deployed with particular skill here: the “authors” share memories on the same basis as their interviewees, memories of non-communication allied with a yearning to forgive and be forgiven. One strand of the material is the return to home ground, and a portrait of life in those particular locations. The essential location, though, is internal: the perspective from any body with a Y chromosome. Anyone who has been a father, or who has ever had one, will not only recognise the relationships here, but will also find themselves musing on their own history.

Written for the Financial Times.