A fantastic Voyage

John Mortimer is one of those rare writers who has perfected the art of autobiographical reminiscence for the stage.

A Voyage Round My Father, produced in 1971 with Alec Guinness and lashings of applause, is a mellow comedy of filial thanksgiving to Sir John's blind barrister father of the title, who lived in the country and specialised in divorce, dahlias and drowning earwigs.

It has improved with time. Thea Sharrock's beautifully pitched and acted production captures a lost England of prep-school masters recommending cold showers for hot thoughts, small boys warned that life cannot be faced without the ability to fox-trot and the adult Mortimer immersed in World War II patriotic movie-making: "Jerry's being a bit naughty tonight then, Hilda."

It speaks to me like a personally delivered letter. I watched in a haze of moist eyes and amusement.

Mortimer wistfully celebrates a peculiar, enduring phenomenon, the professional, middle-class Anglo-Saxon male, whose comical eccentricities mark a flight from intimacy, shielding him from genuine communciation or from engaging with harsher, unpleasant facts of life.

Father's blindess is never referred to and a riveting scene of social embarrassment occurs when the son's wife-to-be, Natasha Little's stylish, tactless Elizabeth asks: "Why do you all walk about pretending he's not blind?"

The family have made pretending a way of life. They put on performances for each other and what fun these are.

The reference to "voyage" and "round" hints at the insurmountable distance dividing Sir Derek Jacobi's moustached, querulous father from Dominic Rowan's far too disengaged and impassive son.

Rowan speaks as narrator, setting his life-story in flowing stream of reminiscence motion, watches from the sidelines and becomes caught up in the action, with, or sometimes against, his father.

"Once you're married," Sir Derek's paterfamilias warns "your income will be frittered away on Vim, saucepans, scourers, Mansion Polish, children's vests and such-like luxuries."

This free-flowing comedy needs an abstract or expressionistic staging, but Robert Jones's consists merely of a bed of flowers and Peter Mumford's lighting casts a far too realistic glow.