Writer: John Mortimer
Director: Richard Eyre
Audiences coming to Richard Eyre’s production of A Voyage Round My Father with fond memories of the 1982 TV adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates will find most of their old favourites here. There is John Mortimer’s familiar sequence of comic sketches about prep school boys and eccentric masters and droll courtroom scenes in which the son, as a callow barrister, tries to adopt his father’s unnerving techniques. And of course, we return regularly to the family home where the father barks out his outrageous, often hilarious views at breakfast, or wages war on the earwigs in his dahlias in their large garden.
Richard Eyre suggests endless summer days with a set suggesting a leafy garden, sunlit and echoing with birdsong. This is beautifully recreated by designer Bob Crowley, Hugh Vanstone and Sam Waddington (lighting) and John Leonard (sound).
Rupert Everett as the father, the elderly blind barrister, is superb, born it seems to wear a Panama hat and loose cardigan. He effortlessly conveys the uncertainties of old age while maintaining the unyielding dominance of the character. It’s a very funny part, and Everett does it justice. We can really believe he is blind as he stares round trying to pick up sounds. Some of his best scenes are towards the end, Everett coming into his own playing the now benign grandfather enthralling children with his tales.
Jack Bardoe, as the son, has the more difficult job, having to play a child, then a schoolboy and then demonstrate the transformation from hesitant young man – briefly a hopeless assistant film director – to confident, cocky barrister. Scenes in which adults play young children are almost inevitably awkward and this is the case here. The story of his falling in love and marrying is nicely told, however, not least because of a stylish performance by Allegra Marland as the glamorous and then put-upon wife Elizabeth. It’s still funny when her prospective father-in-law explains he has no problem thinking of her as a daughter-in-law. His issue is why anyone should want to marry his son.
But for all this, it feels as if there’s something missing. There are literal omissions, of course. One misses the fabulous scene in a first-class railway carriage where the father insists his wife read aloud the salacious details of the divorce case on which he is working. The TV version not only had the advantage of the charming locations, but we saw the stifled disgust of the fellow passengers as the wife is forced to repeat the fact that bedsheets had been observed to be ‘stained’. This scene is omitted in this production. And there are occasions when jokes are fluffed. It’s a shame that poor old Wordsworth inadvertently becomes the butt of the joke about opium and constipation. It was not he but Coleridge who of course was ‘a stranger to the lavatory’.
It’s hard to say what else is missing. But while this is a likeable production, there is something staid about it. Perhaps it’s just that Mortimer’s first version of it appeared 60 years ago and sketches about prep schools and lesbian land girls no longer seem fresh.
Runs until 14 October 2023 and continues to tour
