A Voyage Round My Father

This show has now closed, click here for a listing of current and future London shows

Play Closed 16 December 2006

Wyndham's Theatre Charing Cross Road, London

John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father directed by Thea Sharrock and starring Derek Jacobi and Dominic Rowan as Father and Son.

John Mortimer's autobiographical play is the affectionate portrait of a son's relationship with his father. Growing up in the shadow of the brilliant barrister, who adored his garden and hated visitors, and whose blindness was never mentioned, the son continually yearns for his father's love and respect.

"Thea Sharrock's beautifully pitched and acted production... An unmissable comic trip" The London Evening Standard

Following a sell-out run at The Donmar Warehouse (from 8 June to 5 August 2006), Thea Sharrock production of A Voyage Round My Father transfers to the West End's Wyndham's Theatre for a strictly limited season. The cast for A Voyage Round My Father at The Wyndham's Theatre features Derek Jacobi and Dominic Rowan as Father and Son along with Joanna David as 'Mother'. The cast also includes Christopher Benjamin, Lily Bevan, Neil Boorman, Osmund Bullock, Jamie De Courcey, Natasha Little, Sadie Shimmin and Katie Warren. Cast subject to change.

"Wonderfully funny and touching" The Independent

Barrister, playwright, novelist and raconteur, John Mortimer is best known for his Rumpole of the Bailey stories. He is also the author of numerous film scripts including Cider with Rosie and Zeffirelli's Tea with Mussolini.

"This is John Mortimer's best play, a play hilariously and profoundly English, so profoundly as to be universal... Thea Sharrock's production is spare, precise and moving: the actors play together like an orchestra of minds... Derek Jacobi creates... a masterful performance, towering, touching and tragic: one of the great events of the year." The Sunday Times

"An evening of rare and continuous pleasure" The Daily Telegraph

"And if you've never seen a truly English setting of an English play, go to Thea Sharrock's production of A Voyage Round My Father... a portrait both of eccentricity and of upper-middle-class manners... Thea Sharrock's production - long grasses set among heavy-headed poppies - looks enticing... Every joint is neatly turned." The Observer

"All Aboard, All Aboard! Sir John Mortimer's autobiographical pleasure cruise A Voyage Round My Father is departing from the Donmar for a gentle pootle round upper-middle-class family life between the wars... A Voyage may not take us very far, but it's a stylish little outing." The Sunday Telegraph

"A Voyage Round My Father smacks of slightly saccharine, summertime easy-viewing, with the flashbacks to prep school looking particularly flimsy. But they are anecdotally droll and Derek Jacobi is on top form as the titular, delightfully eccentric yet crushing blind barrister." The Independent on Sunday

"I grew up the only child of a blind barrister and a mother who devoted her life to caring for him, in what was then a remote part of the Chiltern Hills" writes John Mortimer, the author of A Voyage Round My Father. "After my father's death I began to write scenes about growing up with him and finally turned them into a play. I still live in the house he built and try to keep the garden in the state to which he had accustomed it, although I have never managed to grow nectarines, as he did, on the terrace. And I can reassure the anti-blood sports groups by saying that I no longer drown the earwigs. Sometimes I think my father never seriously taught me the difference between right and wrong, and I'm quite confused about that to this day. But in what I read and what I write, and perhaps in my general attitude to life, it is his standards that I still refer to because he taught me everything. I hope that becomes clear in my play A Voyage Round My Father.".