John Mortimer is best known for the excellent Thames TV series, Rumpole of the Bailey, which was inspired by his barrister father and ran for seven series from 1975 to 1992. His earlier play A Voyage Round My Father which played the West End in 1971 starring Sir Alec Guinness, also later became a film for TV with Sir Laurence Olivier, and is said to be autobiographical about his relationship with his father. This revival over fifty years later, directed by the brilliant Richard Eyre and designed by the wonderful Bob Crowley, therefore has great pedigree and promises insight into this clever and witty writer who died in 2009 at the age of 85.

The play explores his relationship with his father, blinded in an accident when he hit his head and how it shaped his life and other relationships. The father is presented as an irascible man with a short fuse temper and disdainful attitude towards people he regarded less clever than himself. He is not painted as a very sympathetic character and others tiptoe around him in fear of an outburst or withering putdown. We see the son (John Mortimer himself) sent away at 13 to a public school in 1936 and then maturing into a writer, becoming a barrister himself, marrying a divorcee through to his father’s death in 1961.

Rupert Everett plays the Father with a fixed stare of a blind person and an uncertain hesitant movement as he patrols around his garden in search of earwigs and barking commands and instruction at members of his family. It is a tricky role to pull off with the limitations on engaging us an audience through his eyes, expressions and unpleasant personality. Opposite Everett, Jack Bardoe has a much more varied role as his son from the first nervous timid interactions as thirteen-year-old through his unsuccessful attempt at being an Assistant Film Director to his marriage to Elizabeth, and we do engage with his character while feeling he might end up like his father. Indeed, the programme notes suggest that John Mortimer was far from perfect and was known to stand up on aircraft and scream “we’re all going to die” at the top of his voice. Allegra Marland, first as Iris, a young girl he knew before going away to schools and then Elizabeth, his wife, is excellent with a delightful contrast between the two roles and a powerful last two scenes with the Father when she stands up to him over dinner and that seems to create a previously absent bond between them. It is only in the touching final scenes that the play creates any emotional heart. The cast work hard to breathe life into the characters and timeline and do a good job within the play structure.

For much of the play, it is episodic short scenes with several longish speeches of exposition from the son and meetings with what seem stereotypical caricatures, the downtrodden working-class jockey, the overbearing posh school master, the schoolboy rival, and the film gaffer. Fifty years on from when it was written, it gives a glimpse into a lost world of class snobbery and public-school indoctrination that has been long forgotten or sidelined into a smaller less influential niche section of society. The female characters are mostly portrayed as the servers of tea and dinner, giggling schoolgirls or lesbian lovers and it is the men that dominate the world they live in. This may have been how it was but today, it just feels anachronistic with little to say to a modern audience and meaning nothing to a younger audience who have never heard of Rumpole or John Mortimer.

This whole sense of a past memory is amplified by the staging with a pretty green pastoral scenery of a woodland glade, mainly to represent the garden of the father’s house to frame the limited action where the cast are mainly dressed in black and white clothes , changing coats and ties on stage as we drift from recollection to recollection. The lighting picks out different areas with a few pieces of furniture placed by the silent stage crew dressed in caps and work coats of a previous generation.

Rumpole was a wonderful creation and an iconic TV series of the 70s and 80s. There are hints about how the character was developed from this play but we don’t learn much, and although there are trade mark Mortimer dry witticisms and mild innuendo which brings ripples of gentle laughter, even at one point applause, the overriding sense is of a grumpy old man with an unkind sense of self-importance and a patient supportive family who put up with him and that, for us, is not enough to justify its revival.

*** Three stars

Reviewed by: Nick Wayne

A Voyage Round My Father plays at Theatre Royal Bath until 7 October before continuing its tour.