Sir John Mortimer - Review

Irresistible charm of an old ranconteur

Charles Spencer reviews Mortimer's Miscellany at King's Head Theatre, Islington

At the age of 83, frail, myopic and wheelchair-bound, Sir John Mortimer still can't resist the lure of the limelight.

John Mortimer seems determined to grow old disgracefully
Braving the rain, frost and snow, he's booked into the King's Head, a venue with a strong claim to being the most uncomfortable and dilapidated in London, for most of the cruel month of February - and he couldn't look happier.

Evidently determined to grow old disgracefully, he has a rotating cast of beautiful female actresses of a certain age to support him, whose tasks include wheeling him on to the stage, securing the brakes on his chair and gazing at him with frank adoration.

Such affection is richly deserved. Mortimer has added far more than most to the public stock of harmless pleasure, not least with his creation of the great Rumpole of the Bailey. And his common sense, liberal values and delight in mischief are a lesson to us all in a drab, increasingly conformist Britain in which our freedoms seem to be constantly eroded.

He mistrusts politicians, he observes at one point in the show, because "they pay far too little attention to love, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". No one could accuse Mortimer of slouching in these departments, and his delightfully old-fashioned show is a celebration of a life well lived.

Mortimer and his two attentive acolytes (Joanna David and Rohan McCullough at the matinée I attended) read a well-chosen selection of poems, ranging from Hardy to Auden and from Housman to Betjeman.

When Mortimer himself, in that distinctively light, conspiratorial, and unexpectedly camp voice recites the final line of Browning's A Toccata of Galuppi's - "I feel chilly and grown old" - a palpable shiver of mortality goes round the theatre. Yet for the most part the show's tone is light, funny and engaging.

A pianist plays popular classics and La Vie en rose and Mortimer regales us with his apparently fathomless, if not always entirely unfamiliar, stock of anecdotes, many of them involving the legal life. I particularly loved the story of the judge, due to deliver his summing up, who assembled counsel to explain that he had inadvertently left his speech at home. "Fax it up, my lord," suggested one QC helpfully. "Yes it does, rather," replied the absent-minded judge.

There are fond memories, too, of Mortimer's father, the blind divorce lawyer who has inspired so much of his son's work and life, not least in that funny and poignant memory play A Voyage Round My Father, superbly revived last year.

Mortimer père was a man who once proved adultery in a divorce case with reference to a pair of footprints, upside down, on the dashboard of an Austin 7. No son could be prouder of his dad when Mortimer describes the incident.

There was a particularly tender moment at the end when Joanna David read Rochester's Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover: "But still continue as thou art/Ancient person of my heart."

As Mortimer sat there, his face wreathed in a sleepily beatific smile, it was hard to resist the temptation to let out a hearty "here, here". I just hope this perpetually cash-strapped theatre has enough champagne for him backstage. He deserves every last drop.