REVIEW: Dear Lupin, Apollo Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Dear Lupin

Apollo Theatre

10/08/15

4 Stars

BOOK TICKETS NOW AND SAVE The Diary of a Nobody, chronicling the bourgeois, suburban adventures of the hapless Mr Pooter and his scapegrace son, Lupin, still stands tall as a gentle comedy classic, and as one of the most unexpected legacies of a Victorian Age not generally known for either gentleness or subtlety in comedy. The basic formula of the forbearing, frustrated father trying to manage and understand the foibles and misdemeanours of a wayward son is of course a familiar one in the history of world literature; but in placing the correspondence between himself and his son Charlie in direct descent from the Grossmiths’ minor masterpiece, Roger Mortimer also discreetly laid claim to a certain of type of ironic, self-deprecating, wry English humour designed to mask pain which is the key to understanding the charm and pathos of this play.

Mortimer was for many years one of the leading British writers on racing and the history of the turf. He was most at ease behind a typewriter, and what we have here is the record of his free-wheeling engagement with his son, who lurched through the 60s, 70s and 80s from one attempted career to another amid a chaotic haze of booze, drugs and sex. The letters were gathered together a few years back and after proving an unexpected success as a book have been adapted for the stage by Michael Simkins, with the addition of extra material that fleshes out Charlie’s life story and character.

The particular attraction of this material lies not only in the self-evident skills of observation and description in Mortimer’s writing but in his own grace of character. There is a breadth of understanding of human nature and interest in all its quirks which helps him encompass and come to a reckoning with his son’s latest enormity or affront. But there is also an amused ability to shape a range of Dickensian grotesques out of his wider family, neighbours and friends that is hugely entertaining. It is a similar joy to the one you find in the diaries of Alan Clark, a writer of similar skill, though someone hard to warm to in the way you do to Mortimer, who is more than willing to turn the joke on himself.

However, the first question for a reviewer is how well does this material translates to the stage? Plays based on letters or diaries are notoriously difficult to infuse with dramatic life – indeed only Dangerous Liaisons has fully convinced me in the theatre, and that is perhaps a special case because of the strong narrative line and multiple letter writers of the original which left far less for Christopher Hampton to do in adaptation. In this case the key issue is how best to balance narrative flow with the establishing of character. Too much plot detail and you may wonder why these characters should matter. Too many bons mots and hilarious stories and you can get bogged down in complacent joke-telling and wonder why this material needs to move from page to stage.

Simkins has a hard task therefore, and in the first half the pace does sag at points despite the technical skill of the actors. Tellingly the most absorbing section is where story and material first fuse at length in the story of how Charlie decides to join his father’s old regiment. After overcoming the toughest challenges, he nevertheless falls at the final fence by his own choice – almost as an act of conscious, cruel defiance of his father. This episode is poignant, extremely funny in detail and as revealing an account of the bizarre features of army life as you will find in – say – Evelyn Waugh.

When we come back from the interval the tone darkens markedly, and a clear narrative focus is maintained throughout as Roger’s health fails and Charlie’s lifestyle begins to catch up with him. The coming together of father and son is very touchingly achieved without becoming sentimental and that is a tribute to the calculated reticence of the original material and Simkins’ trust in his actors to show that less is more. It is one of those occasions in the theatre where although you know the dénouement from a long way out, you cannot but be moved by the deftness and delicacy with which it is reached.

It is perhaps churlish and square of me to say, but overall I still could have done with more grittiness and less comfortable playing up to notions of English eccentricity. Charlie is not an attractive personality fundamentally and the rough edges are inevitably smoothed off in a performance and persona as charming as Jack Fox’s here. Moreover, in order to understand how Roger Mortimer became the droll observer of human quirks we need to know more about his wartime career – captured at Dunkirk and harshly imprisoned for the duration. Clearly the modesty and humour were something of a defence mechanism against a great deal of remembered pain. To really understand and represent an upper middle class Englishman of that generation requires more effort to excavate below the self-protective carapace.

That said is hard to imagine a better-suited pair of actors in this genre than James and Jack Fox. The casting director should get an honourable mention in the programme! It really helps to have a genuine father and son combination in this format. There is an unforced intimacy and mutual knowledge between the two players that wins you over early on – for example, when a lock of James Fox’s hair stuck out after a costume change at one point his son just leaned over and smoothed it back into place. A minor detail but unimaginable in unrelated actors.

James Fox has played many of these types of Englishmen on stage and in films over the years, but that does not mean that there is anything routine about his performance. His languid manner and loose-limbed body-language is just right and he manages to convey the fact that Roger had some secret sympathy with rebellion himself. Roger was not by any means a re-run of Denis Thatcher as depicted in Private Eye’s Dear Bill. Fox has to play many character roles too – army officers, an officious bureaucrat, a camp auctioneer (evoking memories of his Anthony Blunt in A Question of Attribution) – to fill out Charlie’s side of the story.

Jack Fox has the harder task in many ways, given that his father has all the best lines and the moral high-ground too. However, in the second half he is given more scope to develop a calibrated performance, and he does fine work with his concluding eulogy, despite an unforgiveable interruption from a mobile phone in the audience.

A lot of effort has gone into making sure that there is great deal of movement and costume change to look at so as to avoid any sense of a static recital. This is doubtless a tribute to the work of director Philip Franks, who, as a former actor himself, keeps the play moving admirably. The set devised by Adrian Linford is ideal too: both over-stuffed and flexible at the same time. It has the cluttered random accumulation of objects you would expect in Roger’s large but run-down house, while offering easy access to props and costumes needed for individual scenes.

Inevitably there are many priceless anecdotes that had to be left out of this play, and its dramatic transformation is not perfect. But it captures the spirit of the original faithfully, and will one hopes bring more readers to a book that is now well on its way to becoming a modern classic. Humour like this, formed in the face of adversity, is a form of grace that generously helps to make life more bearable for everyone else.

BOOK TICKETS NOW - Dear Lupin runs at the Apollo Theatre until 19 September 2015