28 September – 7 October
One suspects – perhaps even hopes – that with our more successful playwrights, there is more to the play that meets the eye, or jumps off the page or gets picked up and in some way foregrounded by the director. Not having seen this play since Olivier played it on TV some years ago I was pleasantly surprised to find myself reassured in the case of John Mortimer. In this offering starring Rupert Everett and directed by Richard Eyre, whilst inevitably seduced in our expectations by the title it is the broad hinterland of the narrative that catches us unawares.
Mr Everett endows the character of Father enough weight and irascibility to give, what is of course a touching and loving tribute, a singular context to an age and a class. In many ways an impossible figure as a father who lacks the interpersonal skills one would hope for in one’s own parents, there is in this performance the kind of eccentricity, singularity of outlook and purpose that we find irresistible.
Whilst Father is of course the central character around which all else moves, The Son (Jack Bardoe) is more than mere narrator of his father’s life as husband, father and barrister. The play is as much his biography as his father’s and it was the school scenes that had echoes of, Oh What A Lovely War! Julian Wadham as the Headmaster is the breezy epitome of a certain kind of Englishness; deeply mistrustful of sexual awakening in boys and unblinkingly patriotic, being a cheerleader for the, ‘Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori’, cast of sentiment that so enraged Wilfred Owen. Indeed Mortimer has written a deeply ironic episode in which the young Son and a school chum, Reigate (Calum Finlay) play out a scene from the trenches of The Great War in front of (the by now blind) Father. For all that The Son bore the stamp of Father, for example in his love of poetry and the law, there is in the play a sense of more than a mere passing on of the baton, rather a culture finding a different gear in which one detects the faintest echo of The Entertainer.
Women famously feature strongly in Mortimer’s life and in the long suffering and selfless companionship of Mother (Eleanor David) and his own wife (Allegra Marland) the voyage finds safe havens in otherwise rarely placid waters.
Bob Crowley’s lush setting of an English country garden provides a kind of stasis against which all else happens.
★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 5 October 2023
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan
