A LEARNED FRIEND REMEMBERED
Rumpole of the Bailey is occasional comfort-viewing in our house, thanks to Talkingpicturestv repeats. John Mortimer’s portrait of the old barrister and the atmosphere of Chambers express more of a golden memory of his late eccentric father than of our modern RAAC-courthouse world, as the author himself admitted. But it is a world of attitudes and assumptions worth revisiting , even if only anthropologically. And this memoir of the “voyage” we all take, working our way round a spectacular parent, is a marvel: a circuit from childhood awe, teenage scepticism, adult embarrassment and revolt and finally the moment of looking back. And finding that for all the exasperation, you are lonely without that presence.
Jack Bardoe narrates as young Mortimer , nimbly moving from early childhood and baffled prep-school to following the old man’s legal footsteps, marrying, moving on, finding his own different gift. Rupert Everett, who somehow at 64 is hitting his glorious peak, is the patriarch. Wonderful, he is: a moulting eagle, capable of commanding a courtroom in towering contempt or dominating a stage from a basket-chair with sightless Samson eyes (his blinding, in an early coup de theatre, stunned a neighbour in my row, new to the story).
From him come the familiar Rumpolean diatribes, like the one against the perils of marriage causing your fees to be frittered away on “Vim and children’s vests”, and the one about the consolation of divorce cases being their rich content of comedy. The son expresses the struggle to be different and the realisation that he never quite will be. Eleanor David is a treat too, as that endangered, almost extinct creature the affectionately resigned wife. In elegant balance every small gesture as she fusses around her husband tells a long ,long and not unhappy story.
One critic found Richard Eyre’s production too much softened – Olivier’s spikier rages are remembered in the role – but I didn’t. Because there is something beautiful in Everett’s interpretation of a man of his generation , stoical and unimpressible. This was my Dad’s generation: stuck between the waste and loss of the Great War, living through the next one into the 50s: conservative but sceptical, uncomplaining but shudderingly satirical about cant and sentimentality (treasure Everett carolling “Polly Perkins” during an overblown Remembrance hymn). It is a type, mood and attitude free from our sententious modern commentary or signalling. The Rumpolean court scene is a piece of glorious game-playing.
For my generation, half a century younger than Mortimer junior and a century after his father’s prime, the melding of the male characters who were built in that early 20c period is fascinating, and touching. Julian Wadham as the absurd prep school headmaster is better , funnier even than Bennett’s imagining in Forty Years On. The beaten gnarled old jockey advising the prep school boy is superb, as is the eccentric war damaged book-flinging geometry master. It matters to understand and remember what the period did to men and boys: post- Edwardian, pre 1960s. They had strengths and disabling emotional bruises: they were our grandfathers.
It is also interesting to note that for all our anxious me-first individualism and exhibitionist instagram celebrity, today’s Britain is far less good at appreciating and absorbing real eccentrics than we used to be.
I saw it at Richmond: but it’s touring until 18 November. dates below
Cambridge Arts Theatre 17-21 Oct
Cardiff 24-28 Oct
- Then Malvern Festival Theatre, Chichester , and Nottingham Theatre Royal
theatreCat 