Although this debut play by actress Nancy Farino about a father-daughter road trip is confused and uneven I can see why Hampstead backed it. There’s real style and promise in the writing which kept me attentive. And it takes a certain audacity to stage a play partly on a moving bus that (spoiler alert) gets its roof ripped off by a low bridge. Those expecting a story about Nazi Germany, like the Robert Harris novel of the same name, should know that the territory of Fatherland is closer to the sitcom Motherland – a place of failed parenting.
Farino herself plays the ironically-named Joy, a troubled 26-year-old nursery assistant, whose eccentric, exasperating father Winston Smith (Jason Thorpe) turns up at her door one day with an old school bus he’s bought. Having recently discovered some unsuspected half-siblings and traced the family’s roots to County Mayo, he wants Joy to join an impulsive quest to Ireland to look for people with facial features like his. He’s installed beds in the bus, a broken CD player and a “poo pipe”.
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