PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
A Voyage Round My Father
‘One of Britain’s best-loved writers … [A] special blend of wit, humanity and nostalgic English melancholy’ Charles Spencer, The Times
‘A writer with a Dickensian gift for character and rich, robust humour’ Daily Mail
‘There are an enormous number of people whose lives he made happier and better by his writing’ Melvyn Bragg, Guardian
‘A great storyteller’ Robert McCrum, Observer
‘Only Shakespeare or Dickens could have done him justice in print; only they could have unsentimentally invoked his strain of English kindness and ebullient good nature’ Sebastian Faulks
‘One of Britain’s greatest life-enhancers … a superb example to us all’ Daily Telegraph
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923, John Mortimer was a barrister, dramatist and novelist. After working in the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War, he wrote a number of novels before simultaneously following two highly successful careers as a criminal barrister and as a playright. His most famous play, A Voyage Round My Father, has been filmed and is frequently revived. In the 1970s he invented Horace Rumpole, a character who, ‘like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal’ (P. D. James). In the 1980s he returned to novel-writing with Paradise Postponed. He also wrote four volumes of memoir, including the bestselling Clinging to the Wreckage. John Mortimer was knighted in 1998 for his services to the arts. For many years he lived in a house in the Chilterns which had been built by his father, also a barrister. Sir John died in 2009, aged eighty-five.
JOHN MORTIMER
A Voyage Round My Father
The Dock Brief
What Shall We Tell Caroline?
with an Introduction by Valerie Grove
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A Voyage Round My Father first published in Great Britain by Methuen & Co Ltd 1971
The Dock Brief first published in Great Britain by Elek Books Ltd 1958
What Shall We Tell Caroline? first published in Great Britain by Elek Books Ltd 1958
A Voyage Round My Father copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1971
The Dock Brief copyright © John Mortimer, 1958
What Shall We Tell Caroline? © John Mortimer, 1958
All rights reserved
The rights in these plays are strictly reserved. Applications for performance should be made to: Margaret Ramsay Ltd, 14a Godwin’s Court, St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4L. No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained prior to rehearsals.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195987-0
Introduction
Clifford Mortimer was a distinguished lawyer in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty division (known jocularly as Wills, Wives and Wrecks). He was passionately interested in legal argument, formidable in cross-examination, and eloquently nimble in court. He did not live to see his son recreate him as the main character in a popular and long-running play, a role interpreted by (so far) four theatrical knights. Nor could he know that his habit of quoting from the great poets would be used by his son when he invented the much-loved comic barrister Rumpole. Clifford’s dedication to the law was serious and scholarly. Born in Bristol, but raised and educated in South Africa, he had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge to read law at sixteen, and by the age of twenty-six, in 1911, had published a voluminous, 1363-page legal textbook, Mortimer on Probate, still used today.
In 1923, when his only son John was born, Clifford was driven every day from Hampstead to his chambers at 1 Dr Johnson’s Chambers in the Temple, to proceed to the Royal Courts of Justice. There he was mostly engaged in family disputes over wills (one of these being inscribed on the shell of a blown duck egg), but also to handle the then-rare cases of divorce. Divorce was still essentially a middle- and upper- class indulgence: in 1936 Clifford was instructed to appear with the Attorney General in the case of Simpson v Simpson, to enable the King to marry the woman he loved. All divorces were reported in The Times in fascinating detail: tearful letters from faithless wives begging for merciful release from brutal or indifferent husbands; servant girls’ dalliances with employers, and lodgers’ with landladies; graphic evidence gleaned through lamp-lit windows by snooping policemen. John heard all about these from his father, and would later amuse audiences by saying he had been raised, fed, clothed and schooled on the proceeds of adultery and the wilful failure to consummate.
But by 1939, when John was sixteen and at Harrow, Clifford knew his sight was failing fast, despite many operations to correct the injury done when he struck his head on a ladder he had bought in Gamages in Holborn (not, as in the play, on an apple tree in the garden). In a letter to his sister Gertie in South Africa, he sang John’s praises – ‘I think him a genius, though Kathleen won’t have it so.’ The boy was ‘the most cheerful and entertaining of companions … with a great sense of fun’; he read widely, had won prizes for recitation, wrote short stories and verse, and loved painting and stage design. He would spend hours with his miniature theatre, creating sets, costume and lighting.
Clearly the boy’s leaning was towards the theatre. But Clifford urgently wanted John to join him in chambers, to help him out, and pulled every string to get him into Oxford to read law at seventeen. John’s housemaster at Harrow confided to the principal of Brasenose College how little suited young Mortimer would be to taking a law degree. ‘He has done some rather brilliant essay-work for the School Magazine, mainly on Art subjects… . I think he might do really well in the English Schools – only his Father is apparently determined that he should read Law.’
John never took to his law studies; he found the subject unbearably tedious, and when he eventually sat his Bar finals had to resit papers. By the time he was called to the Bar in 1948 he had already published his first novel, based on his wartime year as assistant director and scriptwriter at the Crown Film Unit, a much more appealing calling. By his third novel, however, he could make the hero a junior barrister, and drew on his experience of giving legal advice to the sad and troubled inhabitants of Bethnal Green. Antonia White, reviewing the book in the New Statesman, identified the legal background as ‘Mr Mortimer’s trump card as a novelist’.
It was also his unique selling point as a dramatist. In 1957,
he left aside novels and wrote his first radio play, The Dock Brief. A dock brief is offered to a defendant who arrives in court unrepresented by a barrister: he can take his pick of any robed barrister in court that morning. Prisoner and lawyer meet in the cell for a hasty consultation, cook up a defence, and the trial begins. John had seen these tattered, ageing hack barristers, otherwise unemployed, at the London Sessions, but their archetypes sat in the remoter courts of the Old Bailey, day after day, hoping for a dock brief and a two-guinea fee. (If the trial lasted several days, John noted, it made the Bar a considerably worse-paid profession than selling evening papers outside the Borough tube station.) In his play, the prisoner is a south London bird-fancier accused of murdering his wife. The barrister, Morgenhall, pathetically hopes that this case will make headlines, and his fortune. In the cell the two men rehearse the roles of judge, jury and witnesses. But in the trial, instead of making a brilliant address, Morgenhall is stumped for words. His client is convicted, but is pardoned on the grounds of his lawyer’s incompetence. Nesta Pain produced the play on the Third Programme, with Michael Hordern as Morgenhall and David Kossoff as the prisoner, Fowle. It was hailed by critics for its pathos, its gentle and affectionate understanding of the ineffectual lawyer. It was repeated five times and translated to television, where Bernard Levin described it as a masterpiece: ‘more moving, more funny and more profound than anything I have yet seen by courtesy of the seventh art.’ It was performed on 280 foreign radio stations and won the prestigious Prix Italia prize in 1958.
That year, a new young impresario named Michael Codron, lately down from Oxford, suggested putting on The Dock Brief at the Lyric, Hammersmith. It was too short, but he could pair it with a play by Ionesco. John offered instead to write another play, and came up with What Shall We Tell Caroline? – only to find himself compared by critics to Ionesco. His play did indeed contain elements of the Theatre of the Absurd. Set in a bleak boarding prep school in East Anglia, it features a testy headmaster, his long-suffering wife, a raffish banjo-playing assistant master and the headmaster’s silent, nubile daughter of eighteen, who is treated like a small child. For the entire length of the play Caroline does not utter a word, until at the end she finds voice to announce that she is leaving home. It was whimsical and playful, and Caroline’s muteness strained credibility. But John was hailed as ‘a brilliant new comic playwright’, and likened to Coward, Eliot, Barrie and Anouilh. Kenneth Tynan allowed that Mr Mortimer had taken ‘a gallant belly-dive into the tricky waters of surrealist farce’ and advised him not to continue in this strain, which he did not. However, the double bill transferred to the West End, and this early success guaranteed that anything John now wrote would be assured of an airing on radio and television. Over the ensuing decade he established himself as a consummate playwright, a reputation that was cemented with A Voyage Round My Father.
For much of his life John Mortimer lived in the house he inherited from his father. Clifford had built Turville Heath Cottage near Henley in 1934: a modest house, with green tiled roof, but with thirty acres of land, where he created a magnificent garden, of riotous colour and with orchards of exotic trees.
Every detail of the planting, propagation and blooming of his garden was supervised by Clifford, even when he had become totally blind. The first scene of A Voyage Round My Father takes place in the garden: The Father, in his sixties, with walking stick, inspects his garden and asks his son to describe the dahlias. ‘Paint me the picture,’ he says. Only when the son brings home a school friend, and later his fiancée ‘Elizabeth’, does anyone dare to point out the oddity of the old man’s urgent desire to ‘see’ his garden. Exasperated by the family conspiracy to ignore Clifford’s blindness, Elizabeth blurts out the great unmentionable: ’Why do you bother to do all this gardening? I mean when you can’t see it …’
Clifford’s reaction – asking her to lead him to the magnolia tree in the West Copse – ‘Would you do that? Be my eyes’ – is one of the play’s most touching moments. But Clifford and his unacknowledged blindness hold the family in a kind of tyranny. His wife Kathleen, a former art teacher, is saintly, as John’s mother was in life: patient and uncomplaining in the face of his roars of exasperation and frustration. In the play she addresses her daughter-in-law. ‘Jenny’s so pretty,’ she says of her granddaughter. ‘I’d like to have done a drawing of her. Perhaps a pastel.’ ‘Well, why don’t you?’ retorts the daughter-in-law irritably. ‘Oh, I gave up drawing when I got married. You have to, don’t you – give up things when you get married.’ Daughter-in-law: ‘Do you?’
When did John first perceive that his childhood with his blind father, his education, his Turville Heath neighbours (including the two lesbians who ran the local bookshop) and his brief life in Humphrey Jennings’s film unit, would provide ideal material for a play? Shortly after his father died in 1961, he wrote the first of his ‘memoir plays’, which were eventually blended into A Voyage Round My Father. The Education of an Englishman was broadcast on the Third programme in April 1964, about an only child sent off to an eccentric school like the one John attended, the Dragon School in Oxford. It ends in wartime when the boy declares: ‘My education was over. Now, I thought, I might begin to learn something.’ Two years later he wrote a second memoir play for radio, Personality Split, in which a young man is wrenched out of his happy film job and steered into the law by his father, played for a second time by Roger Livesey. Finally, the two plays were distilled into a television play, A Voyage Round My Father, first shown by the BBC on 16 October 1969.
John had by then honed the piece with a craftsmanlike economy into a little gem. Clifford’s aphoristic challenges – ‘Sex! It’s been greatly overrated by the poets,’ ‘Nothing narrows the mind so much as foreign travel,’ ’There’s a lot of damned dull stuff in old Proust,’ and ‘After you’ve been troubled by a wasp, don’t you love a fly?’ issued ringingly from the dialogue, injecting timely laughter and breaking the tension of the basic situation, the Mortimer family’s chronic social awkwardness. The quotations from Shakespeare and other poets, as in Rumpole, reinforced the other-worldly amusement of the main character, his detached observation of whatever goes on around him. ‘The roses and raptures of vice,’ he would say, quoting Swinburne, ‘are damned uncomfortable, as you’ll certainly find out.’
A mind well stocked with literary quotations was one of Clifford’s legacies to his son. Another was the refusal to acknowledge disability: in old age, wheelchair-bound and nearly blind, John Mortimer’s own determination to carry on writing, lunching and dining out, travelling, theatre-going, and performing on stage was pursued (with the aid of a team of helpers and his own family) in an exact replication of his father’s example.
While writing John’s biography I often discussed with him the various performances of his best-loved and most critically acclaimed play. We shared the conviction that the engaging actor Mark Dignam, who played Clifford in the first 1969 TV version, could not have been improved upon. (Arthur Lowe played the mad headmaster, and Daphne Oxenford was perfect as John’s mother.) But for the London stage, bigger names were sought to play the leads. Sir Alec Guinness and Sir Michael Redgrave took their turn in the West End. In the second TV version of 1982, filmed in the actual garden at Turville Heath Cottage, Lord Olivier gave a definitive performance as Clifford, even though his lines had to be pinned to trees in the garden. This became the one etched on the national memory.
In his first volume of memoirs, John reflected on whether Clifford had really been as amusing as he had drawn him. The evidence of Clifford’s diaries, almost exclusively about his garden, suggest a dry and laconic writer, not in any sense a wit. But the comic lines, the lifeblood of the play, can only have been inspired by his father. The Son’s question, ‘Have you ever smoked opium?’ brings forth one of the Father’s funniest ripostes: ‘Certainly not! Gives you constipation. Dreadful binding effect. Ever seen those pictures of the wretched poet Coleridge? Green around the gills and a stranger to t
he lavatory.’
I have seen this play at least a dozen times, in all its forms. The last was at the Donmar Warehouse in 2006, with Sir Derek Jacobi, the fourth theatrical knight to inhabit the role of Clifford. I sat by Sir John’s wheelchair, on a level with the stage, watching the poignant last scene with the Father in a basketwork wheelchair. It was powerfully affecting. The play was now a period piece, but had the same impact as when first seen thirty-five years earlier. For its dramatic economy and wit, its concentrated evocation of a family’s life, this play is a masterpiece, and its humour never palls.
Valerie Grove, 2010
Contents
A Voyage Round My Father
The Dock Brief
What Shall We Tell Caroline?
A Voyage Round My Father
The first version of A Voyage Round My Father was presented at the Greenwich Theatre in 1970. This final version of the play was first presented at the Haymarket Theatre in August 1971 with the following cast:
FATHER Alec Guinness
MOTHER Leueen MacGrath
SON (grown up) Jeremy Brett
ELIZABETH Nicola Pagett
SON (as a boy) Jason Kemp
FIRST BOY
REIGATE Jeremy Burring
SECOND BOY
IRIS Melanie Wallace
GIRL
HEADMASTER Jack May
GEORGE
HAM Mark Kingston
BOUSTEAD
SPARKS
MR MORROW
LADY VISITOR Phyllida Law
MATRON
MISS COX
DORIS
SOCIAL WORKER
MRS REIGATE Rhoda Lewis
MISS BAKER
FIRST ATS GIRL
WITNESS
RINGER LEAN Andrew Sachs
MR THONG
FILM DIRECTOR
JAPHET Richard Fraser
A Voyage Round My Father Page 1