A Voyage Round My Father

Synopsis

Narrated by the character of the Son, this extraordinary and intensely personal drama has at its heart a most curious father-son relationship, one which cast its shadow (sometimes protective, sometimes stifling) across the author's life.

Our Review:

21 September 2006

NOTE: This review dates from June 2006 and this production's original run at the Donmar Warehouse.

You can hardly move for people writing memoirs about their fathers these days, but one of the first, and one of the best, was John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father, affectionately revived by Thea Sharrock at the Donmar Warehouse.

Mortimer’s account of his growing up literally in the shadow of his blind barrister father and his garden trees has been a constant cottage industry for the author. It was a radio play as early as 1963, then a television play, and a stage play at Greenwich in 1970 with Mark Dignam, a much underrated actor, memorably magniloquent and irascible in the main role.

Alec Guinness made the part his own in the West End in 1971, silkily self-contained and poetic, and in 1982 Laurence Olivier thundered opposite Alan Bates as the filial narrator in a second television version, playing one of the two deathbed scenes Morti...

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Latest User Review

156.34.145.74) - 1 December 2006:

Derek Jacobi outdoes himself in this sterling and powerful performance. How he manages the energy to do it twice on matinee days, I have no idea, but I hope he goes on forever! ...

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