A Voyage Round My Father Sails On

A 1982 television film durected by Alvin Rakoff for Thames Television, starring Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates, Jane Asher, Elizabeth Sellars, Michael Aldridge, Alan Cox

By MICHAEL BILLINGTON

15 April 1984 LONDON -- John Mortimer's ''A Voyage Round My Father'' has become one of the longest journeys in media history. The work began as three half- hour sketches for BBC-Radio in 1966. It then became a prize-winning one- hour BBC-Television play in 1970. Mr. Mortimer rewrote it as a film script for Rex Harrison, which never got made because of money problems. And it was this version that in 1982 was turned into another award-winning television film (this time made by Thames Television) starring Laurence Olivier as Mr. Mortimer's blind, eccentric barrister-father, with Alan Bates as his son.
It is unusual for any play to have such a long life. It is even more unusual in Britain, where plays mostly concern themselves with social issues, for anyone to write about the love a child feels for a parent. Admittedly, in this case the parent is a somewhat special figure: a practicing barrister whose blindness is never mentioned in his own household, a testy loner who charges off around his garden on regular, nocturnal earwig hunts, a provocative eccentric always lobbing outrageous generalizations (e.g., all education is useless) into the family circle.
Why does John Mortimer, a 61- year-old successful barrister, playwright and novelist who views the world with chuckling astonishment through thick horn-rimmed glasses, think a biographical study of his own father should have become so universally popular? ''It's a lucky play in that everyone has a father,'' he replied during a recent interview. ''So, however peculiar my own childhood was - and it was peculiar - it strikes a common chord. There is no such thing as a normal childhood. I think everybody is mad, unusual and eccentric. The only thing is that writers notice it. But perhaps the play also uncovers those feelings of pain, embarrassment and guilt we all at some stage have about our parents. There were times when I was ashamed of having a blind father, and I despise myself for it. But also I think the play is about a vanishing middle-class English world, which my father totally personified.''

This is a recurrent theme with Mr. Mortimer: the erosion of a secure, stable bourgeois world that could sometimes be cold-hearted (Mr. Mortimer delightedly recalls a prisoner-of-war in a Japanese concentration camp turning to an English inmate and saying, ''Cheer up, it's not nearly as bad as school'') but that also had its virtues. The odd thing is that Mr. Mortimer spent much of his time as a barrister in the libertarian 60's defending clients who were attacking the middle-class citadel; to this day, he retains a passionate dislike of censorship and remains a fierce opponent of what he calls the nanny-State.
Does he see himself as a nostalgic libertarian? ''Absolutely,'' he said. ''That is very much the theme of my autobiography, 'Clinging to the Wreckage,' where a man who psychoanalyzes me says that I want to get into the House of Lords purely to blow it up. But there are values in the middle-class world I was brought up in that I want to see preserved. My father, for instance, had a professionalism that had nothing to do with money: a sense of duty, of calling, of pride in one's vocation. But I also think the middle classes of his generation had an idea of social conscience and wished to help those less fortunate than themselves. That may have been paternalistic, but it was also genuinely selfless. Now in Mrs. Thatcher's England we have a middle class that has lost that sense of altruism.''
So, ''A Voyage Round My Father'' is a tribute to a vanished social tribe as well as to Mr. Mortimer's own father. But how strange was it for Mr. Mortimer to watch Mr. Olivier playing his own father, and indeed Mr. Bates appearing as the young Mortimer, in Alvin Rakoff's television film? ''It was very weird,'' he said, ''not least because the film was actually shot in the Oxfordshire house where I grew up and where I now live myself. Imagine what it was like to look out of the window of one's study and see Olivier, in my father's very hat, pottering about the garden where I used to walk with my father and describe the plants and flowers to him. I even watched Olivier 'dying' in the self-same bed where my real father died.
''What is fascinating, however, is the way each of the actors who has played the role has brought something different to it,'' he continued. ''Alec Guinness on the West End stage was rather gentle and discreetly sightless. Larry Olivier, who began by making me read the whole play to him, which was a most unnerving experience, said that you couldn't play the role for sympathy, which was very encouraging. I knew then tha he was going to be good.'' What is also intriguing about ''A Voyage Round My Father'' is that there is a lot of pain just below the comic surface. When the son tells the father he wants to be a writer, the father initially ignores the announcement and then suggests it's better to be a lawyer than to sit around all day in carpet-slippers making tea and stumped for words. And Mr. Mortimer concedes that the play is a piece of self-revelation as well as an act of filial homage.

''I regard all writing as a long essay in autobiography,'' he said. ''But although the play records my own loneliness and emotional hurts, I still feel lucky in that now and again in my life I hit on a character who will speak independently. I feel I could write my father's dialogue forever. And I feel much the same about Rumpole, the portly, liberal barrister I created for television. Rumpole only has to appear on the page and he speaks in his own voice.''
Rumpole, like Mr. Mortimer's father, has acquired legendary status, a character who utilizes Mr. Mortimer's life-long preoccupation with the law and who also enables him to say what he believes in a popular television form. ''He does all the mocking of the Establishment from within,'' said Mr. Mortimer, ''which I see myself as doing. He's also become amazingly popular. There's a Rumpole Club in California that meet at Pomeroy's Wine Bar on Sunset Boulevard. Because I write at speed, I sometimes get his address wrong and they sit down and debate these inconsistencies.''

Mr. Mortimer recounts such stories not out of vanity but because ''they prove that writing for television allows you to reach a world-wide audience and launch a character into mythology. Television has been very good to me. I came into theater in the 1950's when it was a good thing to write for. And I came into television at what I think we shall look back on as a halcyon era. I fear that's about to be fragmented in 95 channels of rubbish. But I've written for it at a period when it's got a big universal audience and when, in Britain, we do things well. I've also been fortunate with the actors I've worked with. I've got a new TV play coming on, 'Edwin,' with Alec Guinness, and an adaptation of a John Fowles story, 'The Ebony Tower,' with Olivier. The only thing I don't want to do again is a large-scale adaptation like 'Brideshead Revisited,' because, however interesting it is technically, it becomes like carpentry or joinery.''
But although in ''Brideshead Revisited'' Mr. Mortimer made himself subservient to Evelyn Waugh, it chimes in with his central preoccupation. ''As a writer,'' he explained, ''I've very seldom had a real success that hasn't in some way been to do with either the law or my father or both. Even 'Brideshead' had a lot to do with father-figures in the shape of (the roles played by) Gielgud and Olivier.

'But right now I want to concentrate on my own work rather than someone else's, and I'm half-way through a big project called 'Paradise Postponed,' which I'm writing both as a novel and a 13-part TV series. It starts in 1948 and goes up to the present. It's all set in the Oxfordshire village where I live and the intention is to pursue one story that involves a wide variety of people, like Dickens's 'Bleak House.' It's really about England and how we started off after the war with such high hopes and ended up as we are now. But the first impulse is to write a story and keep people entertained.''
His father, the law, England, Dickens, Shakespeare - these are the elements that thread their way through all of John Mortimer's work (though late in life he has discovered a passion for opera and confesses that he could die happy sipping champagne at Covent Garden between acts of a Puccini opera). And these elements all come together in ''A Voyage Round My Father,'' where the old man turns conversation into cross-examination, sings snatches of music-hall song, envisages what dinner might have been like with the Macbeths and displays all the intransigent middle-class eccentricity that Mr. Mortimer sees as gradually disappearing from English life.
Mr. Mortimer provides in the play an unusual piece of paternal biography. But maybe the work's longevity has something to do with the fact that, in taking us on a voyage round his father, Mr. Mortimer also undertakes a journey into his own complex interior. |||