A fine roll call of actors have played the central parts of overbearing father and obedient son in John Mortimer’s autobiographical drama, including Alec Guinness opposite Jeremy Brett and Laurence Olivier opposite Alan Bates. In Richard Eyre’s production, Rupert Everett is the patrician parent, appraised by Jack Bardoe with love but not sentiment in this memory play and coming-of-age story in one.
It begins in the 1920s, when the unnamed father bangs his head and goes blind, and it spans his career as a divorce barrister, aided by his loyally serving wife (Eleanor David) to his decline into old age and death. Bardoe plays the son in youth and adulthood. After being packed off to boarding school, he shelves his ambitions to become a writer in order to follow his father into the law and then settles into middle-class married life with his wife (Allegra Marland).
In the 1982 film, Olivier was a dangerously raging and obstreperous father. Everett is a fond, gently irascible man from another era who appears slightly vulnerable from the off, bursting into tears as well as rages. That means we do not quite see the transformation from formidable, bad-tempered giant to a diminished father whose hand feels small and loose-skinned in his son’s.
In the programme, Eyre writes about Mortimer, at whose funeral he gave a eulogy in 2009, which brings an added layer of remembrance. But as a production this appears soft-focused and fond with a lightness that undercuts the play’s plaintive depths.
Bardoe’s impression of a young boy is winning, yet brings laughs, which makes it less a hard-edged study of father and son, more a nostalgic snapshot of bygone Englishness filled with boarding-school rules, wartime traumas and such stiff upper lips that the father’s blindness is never mentioned aloud in the household.
There is a lovely, overt theatricality to it all nonetheless, and Bob Crowley’s set design immerses us in the arboreal splendour of the father’s beloved garden. Julian Wadham as the headteacher, meanwhile, brings amusing awkwardness in the euphemistic lecture on sex in which he advises cold baths to pre-pubescent boys who have no idea what he is talking about.
As a story about the psychology of family, it does not uphold Philip Larkin’s statement on parents so much as the truism that we find ourselves turning into them. This is shown in parallels that slowly emerge, the grownup son first silently judging the father (“He had no belief,” he says) but then replicating him – as his wife angrily observes: “You get more like him every day.”
It remains eminently watchable for these universal themes but lacks the emotional intensity to become anything more, and its elements conspire to leave this story, this version of Englishness, far removed from our times.
At Theatre Royal Bath until 7 October. Then touring until 18 November.
