...worth the trip!
Back at Richmond to catch John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father.
This play, staring here Rupert Everett as Mortimer Senior is a well-written memoir of an intolerable man and his son’s surprising affection for him.
Going out of his way to being unlovable, Mortimer Senior was a bully and a recluse and yet Everett manages to play him both as that, and as someone whose son could still love him – we feel something like John Mortimer’s sadness and emptiness when he finally succumbs.
That this is a funny play will come as no surprise of course, Mortimer writes of a man with a sardonic sense of humour, and who was funny, as was his son, but Mortimer is a far better playwright than just that. This is a play where pathos never succumbs to bathos, and its cast successfully ‘sells’ the script admirably.
A simple set (Mortimer’s garden) with effective lighting becomes an hysterical (and very familiar) prep school, a courtroom and a film set, amongst others.
This is having a short run here, and then tours most of the standard try-out theatres. Catch it where you can, it really hasn’t dated, as its themes are universal.