Love letter to our squiffy, silly past
THERE’S no s uccess sweeter than unexpected success. First, r acing correspondent Roger mortimer’s letters to his wayward son enjoyed a modest print run. Then, in 2012, they were serialised on Radio 4, before being dramatised by actor michael Simkins and going on a national tour starring James Fox and his son Jack.
Now they have reached the W est End for a short run in a show that left me with the same kind of warm sentimental glow as a large brandy.
The letters are addressed to mortimer’s loveable n’er-do-well son Charlie, whom he called Lupin. They are a sardonic response to the youngman’s misadventures as a child of the Sixties, but they also chart the trials and tribulations of Dad’s domestic routines in rural Berkshire.
At his best, mortimer matches P . G. Wodehouse’s turn of phrase and character sketches — notably of his sozzled wife ‘Nidnod’ microwaving food in her rakishly angled wig.
The play whisks us through Charlie’s truncated career at Eton after a bungled attempt at losing his virginity in Soho and getting thrown out of school for his troubles — a fate from which not even the intervention of the mighty Field marshal montgomery could ultimately save him.
Yet Charlie is also eager to please his father, trying to make it in the Coldsteam Guards and hiding his drug a buse, alcoholism and homosexuality.
Dad, all the while, is supremely tolerant as only a true English gent can be and the play is a record of their mutual affection.
SOME of the gags are distinctly Jurassic — including one about the late celebrity chef F anny Cradock — and the show does take a while to warm up.
But underpinning the wit is a wistful sadness distilled in a line late on about how mortimer senior feels weak as a vole. He demands no memorial service — ‘just a quick fry-up’.
The real delight of the evening is James F ox as the old sausage himself. Grizzled yet jaunty, he is a middle- stump duffer in a tweed j acket, burgundy cords and suede shoes, with a straw hat drawn down for crafty kips.
Fox senior captures unerringly mortimer’s exasperation, tender - ness and acceptance.
more than this, though, he paints a variety of other characters including the Soho hooker, monty of Alamein, a parade ground sergeant major and an auctioneer modelled on Brian Sewell. P erhaps most brilliant is a vintage Kings Road antiques dealer , in a depiction towards the end of the show.
In comic terms, son Jack is the ‘straight’ guy setting up Dad’s quips and anecdotes with his own scrapes and indiscretions.
He is arguably a little squeakyclean for a sybaritic recidivist, but he makes a bouncing contrast to his creaking pa.
His energy takes Jack all over the bric-a-brac covered stage that is the family home, at one point scaling the furniture in lieu of his orienteering expedition on the Brecon Beacons while in the Army. And between him and his father , they have chemistry to burn. Not only i s Simkins’s adaptation skilfully stitched together , shifting perspective between father and son, it also packs an emotional wallop.
This is partly down to Philip Franks’s direction, swathed in nostalgia for a period that now seems cock-eyed and squiffy from liquid lunches, with the late Peter o’Sullevan’s commentary canter - ing through the background.
But it’s also down to the decline and fall of Dad’s health at the end. And yet it ’s not in the least bit maudlin. Rather, this is an elegy to the folly of youth and the sadness of old age — with terrific affection for both.
Verdict: Nostalgic elegy