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In a historic masonic lodge in Edinburgh’s New Town I find myself raising my hand. The call has gone out for fathers in the audience and I join our hosts, Dick and Dale, along with another volunteer on stage. It’s just us four guys at a campsite, practising trick shots with a baseball, busting some moves and shooting the breeze. But bubbling underneath is an existential crisis.
This is Well-Balanced Dads, from Chicago’s Whisper Theatre Collective, created by Dick and Dale themselves – AKA Richie Schiraldi and Britt Anderson. They’re sporting headbands, bum bags and tank tops blazoned with “Best. Dad. Ever”, each with a different back print – one’s a power drill, the other’s a barbecue. Both have bushy moustaches and they supply us volunteers with our own. There are bursts of classic rock – Foghat, Kenny Loggins, Creedence Clearwater Revival – as we join them on a road trip and other volunteers are cast as hitchhikers.
Fatherhood has given both our hosts a sense of pride and purpose but what happens now their kids have flown the nest, leaving each with just their wives (Mary and, er, Mary) and each other for company? Who is there to appreciate/disdain their dad jokes and dad dancing? We get a lot of both in this highly physical show, which also unexpectedly adds a sensual dads’ dream ballet to the mix, as Dick and Dale take a family-style holiday without the kids in tow.
That means there’s a sweetly melancholic air to these proceedings as the dads play hide and seek, break out their best holiday shirts and end up regressing into children themselves, complete with “are we nearly there yet?” pleas to the hitchhikers. There’s a keen awareness that the Marys usually run the show at home – with the dads packing all the wrong stuff, a bit like when Bandit takes the kids to the pool in Bluey.
The audience participation is refreshingly ridicule-free and the central bromance blossoms, filling the room with goodwill. Individual theatregoers are singled out as legends by the dads for their admirable qualities. “This guy,” marvels Schiraldi as he hovers over my seat, “hasn’t paid his taxes for 18 years!” (I have, honest!) It’s akin to the ribbing you get at a family gathering.
Fathers in the audience will feel seen and may well momentarily cringe if, purely by example, they find these dads also bombastically quoting their favourite lines from Gladiator. You too may find something in your eye – surely sawdust or something equally manly – when Dick and Dale open up about how much they miss their kids and give them a call. One of the offspring heartbreakingly suggests a weekly rather than daily catchup; the other is beginning to show their own care and concern towards their father.
It ends with one of the loveliest scenes I’ve experienced at this year’s fringe as Dick and Dale roam the audience offering fist-bumps, jokes, hugs and other dad business to anyone who needs them. (Yes, they’ve brought a tape measure.) It caps off an hour of gently serious silliness that I enjoyed just as much as my 12-year-old daughter, delighted to see her dad make a fool of himself on stage. But that’s one welcome side-effect of parenthood: becoming 100% unembarrassable.
Over at Summerhall, another couple of legends have a show about parenthood and pride – that’s surely why it’s called Lions. This moustachioed double act blend the character comedy with more openly autobiographical material in a production by the US company Lightning Rod Special that aims to break down “the myths our fathers told themselves about becoming great men”.
There are goofy jokes here, too, about brewskis, barbecue and baseball but the costumes are cravats, tweed and coiffed wigs. There are also echoes of A Christmas Carol and, as we arrive, writer-performers Alice Yorke and Scott R Sheppard are laying a candlelit table as if for a feast yet amid the bagels are a bike helmet, a trophy and assorted paraphernalia. This is a multilayered alternative to an Edinburgh cliche, “the dead dad show”, with each actor announcing – with disarmingly cheery gusto – that they’re here to relive that loss and uncover what kind of men they were.
Directed and developed by Sarah Blush, Lions mashes together eras – the performers are just as likely to brandish quills as record voice notes. It captures the sense that dads always hail from an unrecognisable era for their children, will always seem a bit fusty and formal to them, no matter how hard they try not to.
Lions dramatically deals with the approach and aftermath of death, channelling the over-caffeinated state of waiting in hospitals and how sorting the paperwork becomes a temporary job for the children. There’s a chilling section that brings to mind Forced Entertainment’s unforgettable First Night when they consider who in this audience might die next. The rawness of Yorke and Sheppard’s autobiographical tributes floored me, as did the list of life’s disappointments itemised by Yorke’s dad who wished he’d been braver. Both of these shows offer fatherly advice in different ways – I’m asked to share my old man’s own words of wisdom in Well-Balanced Dads, which by default is a message to my daughter.
Both productions also create comedy from the befuddled reactions of the performers’ parents to their offspring’s artistic pursuits. Olaf Falafel upturns that dynamic with his multimedia fringe hour I Used to Work in a Helium Balloon Factory Until they Let Me Go. He takes great delight in detailing his teenage daughters’ withering responses to a career in comedy that finds him spending hours a day editing squirrel videos, making his own janky Meta glasses from Gü pots and animating a man who used to “twerk on the ducks” to accompany a misheard Bon Jovi lyric.
The difference here is that these dad jokes are regular award-winners and there are also some affectionate, relatable dispatches from dadhood – who hasn’t amassed their own mountain of those hairbands strewn in every corner of the home? One of the many things I loved about the show is how Olaf (it just sounds weird to call him Falafel) breaks off for a passing observation on how adopting a daft mask can be freeing, not just on stage – like a newly acquired, increasingly sweaty joke shop moustache as you try out some dad dancing – but in daily life, too. That’s a top fatherly tip. And there’s a nice final touch as his daughter cheerily holds the bucket for the audience’s money. Maybe he’s not so embarrassing after all.
