It was not uncommon for the young playwrights of the 1960s to be furious with their fathers. But the late John Mortimer was, as usual, an exception. He occupied a genial genre of his own: the amiable young man, whose portrait of his paterfamilias was as generous and humane as anything he wrote.
This is all the more surprising given that Mortimer had more reason to feel frustrated than most. It was his father - a moderately successful but highly eccentric barrister - who dissuaded him from becoming a writer and pushed him towards a career at the bar.
Much of his father's personality would later re-emerge in Mortimer's most enduring character, Rumpole of the Bailey, which was something for which the author could feel thankful. But the most striking aspect of Theresa Heskins's appositely timed revival (which went into rehearsal just as Mortimer's death was announced) is the boundless tolerance it displays. Where most writers would have seen a tyrant, Mortimer saw a fallible gentleman prone to strange foibles - not least his reluctance to admit that, following a gardening accident that tore both retinas, he was completely blind.
Heskins's production glows with a warm nostalgia whose optimistic outlook already appears to belong to a bygone age. But Roy Sampson gives an even-tempered account of the old man's literal and figurative blindness. Mortimer's fond tribute to his father could hardly be a finer tribute to himself.
