Not only did the father of barrister, playwright and author John Mortimer inspire his incomparable
television creation, Rumpole of the Bailey, he is also the central character in Mortimer’s moving and wonderfully funny autobiographical play.
A Voyage Round My Father describes Mortimer's upper middle-class childhood and young adult life between the wars. He grows up in the shadow of his father, a brilliant, eccentric and completely impossible barrister, who goes blind in middle age but insists on continuing with life as though he hasn’t.
Despite sailing off to boarding school and to war-work in a film studio, despite love and marriage and the first glimmerings of a writing career, it is to the charismatic, curmudgeonly father that the son always returns - with exasperation, frustration and, above all, with deep, hard-won love.
This fast-moving production is directed by New Vic Artistic Director, Theresa Heskins.
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