THEATRE
Fashion's favour
KENNETH HURREN
London's 'first night scene' moved down river last week to the Greenwich Theatre, where a full complement of critics (includ-• ing a few who are rarely to be seen farther south than Waterloo Road) and a gay sprinkling of Shaftesbury Avenue's social butterflies were present for the open- ing of John Mortimer's play, A Voyage Round My Father. The pre-curtain throng in the theatre's restaurant. and bars might have been transported direct from the White Sycophant itself.
This is not, I may say, the usual case with Greenwich openings, ane• last. week's frilly turn-out can be accounted only partly to the fact that there were, as it happened, no new productions in the West End itself. With re- spect to Mr Ewan Hooper and his idealistic endeavours to establish a 'community theatre' at Greenwich, I do not believe, either, that his smart-set audience had come to pay their respects to his brave local ven- ture, for he pre§Ents this current item 'in association with 'a West End commercial management. My cynical suspicion, indeed conviction, is that this sudden flare of in- terest in his theatre was due mostly to the position of Mr Mortimer, who is an 'in' figure of the theatrical scene: authors of suburban tryouts (especially those that are exparided treatments of works previously done on television) are not usually, after all, asked to write about them in advance in the Sunday Times or interviewed about them in the Guardian. All this is very much by the way. It has little to do with the business of play-review- ing, and I am sorry if I assume too mtiElt general interest in the distribution of fashion's favour in the theatre, about which the worthy Mr Hooper—who will doubtless recall welcoming a sirrielar gathering at the • opening of another 'in association with'•pre- sentation, a work by that trendy double-act, Ned Sherrin and Caryl Brahms—may well feel a shade cynical- himself. - The play, now that we finally get to it. is not only by Mr Mortimer but about Mr Mortimer. The central figure is ostensibly his father, but the author's paste-up of animated family-album snapshots is inevit- ably and undisguisedly subjective (in looking at the portrait we are never entirely unaware of the portraitist), as though he were seeking .publicly to disclose or discover the extent to which he is his father's son. There are a .great many episodes involving his school- days, wartime experiences, apprenticeship in law, marriage and first steps in playwriting, in which dad is only incidentally concerned, if at all, and it is hard to work up any spec- tacular interest in these matters, which often ' seemed to me as tedious as any stranger's home movies. Altogether it is not wholly free from embarrassment; and insofar as the piece is evocative of a vanished era, I find myself dubious as to whether the 'thirties had, for most of the English middle-classes, quite the residual tincture of Edwardian attitudes apparent in. this particular house- hold.
It is a pity, perhaps, that Mr Mortimer is not more concerned with a study of his father in-depth, for Mortimer senior—a bar- rister who went blind in middle-age—was clearly a remarkable man. The title, though, is indication enough that the voyage is to be peripheral and not, so to speak, into the interior. Recoiling from any really penetra- ting or intimate analysis or conjecture, the dramatist is content to show his visible sur- faces as an amusingly opinionated, mildly irascible eccentric, finding in flippancy—and the occasional sardonic aphorism—his chosen refuge from the anguish of his condition, which he elects virtually to ignore. He is seen continuing to practise enthusiastically at the Bar, and at home his blindness is acknow- ledged but never mentioned—except on a single painful occasion when the .son's wife (crisply played by Amanda Murray) insensi- tively accuses him of self-deceiving escapism. The man's reaction to his tragic affliction compels admiration and repels pity, and if the play has only fragmentary moments of dramatic effectiveness and lacks the search- ing insights that. distinguished say, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey, it at least avoids the mawkishness of such pieces as 1 Remember Mama.
Mark Dignam's simulation of blindness relies on closed or slitted eyes, rather than .blank stare, but for a man whose greatest • concern was to disguise his condition, he seemed to me to make rather too much dis- play of the groping cane-tapping- bit. I had **chanced, that very afternoon, to see a real blind man whose sightlessness was not appa- rent until, making an excusable misjudg- ment of about two yards, he walked confi- dently. up to a tree and tried to post a letter in it. Mr Mortimer's father I take to have been thislind of man; and I wonder whether in a proactilin geared less directly to theat- rical fashion (one mounted wholly, perhaps, by Mr Hooper's down-to-earth outfit), Mr Dienam would have been encouraged to spell it all out in those time-honoured stage terms.
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