Emily Mortimer: ‘I wish I’d written about my dad like he did about his’
One of my clearest memories of childhood is of stealing into a white caravan that was parked in the driveway outside our house. My friend Lucy (who lived along the common and was nine, like me) and I just climbed up the steps, opened the door and went right in. It was very quiet and bright in there. Along with the usual things you’d expect to find in a caravan, we saw a vanity table, a mirror with lightbulbs all around it and a grey wig pinned to a Styrofoam head. We opened the little fridge and saw a pile of Lion bars stacked invitingly on a shelf. We tramped our muddy boots over the carpet, ate the Lion bars and left – like two demented Goldilockses.
Later that day we were told that we had muddied the trailer of, and eaten Lion bars belonging to, Sir Laurence Olivier and that we were mildly in trouble. I didn’t know who Sir Laurence Olivier was, but I hated being in trouble (I still do), and the whole episode had a feeling of transgression about it I can still remember as I write this, over 40 years later.
That white caravan was parked in our driveway because my dad had adapted his play A Voyage Round My Father for the television and they had decided to shoot the scenes that were set in the house my dad grew up in, in the actual house he grew up in. It was the house I’d also grown up in and where my older siblings did a lot of growing up, my younger sister grew up in it and all our kids have grown up there too. It’s the house where my mother still lives. It has yellow window frames, a green tiled roof, is surrounded by a large, unruly garden, and was built in the 1930s by the grandfather I never met, whom the play is mainly about.
If breaking into Laurence Olivier’s trailer was my version of falling down the rabbit hole, there followed weeks more of strangeness and magic as, room by room, our house was filled with different furniture, pictures, curtains and light fittings. I thought it all looked so much nicer than how we usually had it. There were suddenly things that matched each other and looked clean. I remember watching the royal wedding on television with my parents one morning when the crew and actors were all gone. We watched Lady Di walk down the aisle while we sat on a sofa that didn’t belong to us, surrounded by cables and lights and other strange pieces of equipment and it really did feel like I’d fallen into a kind of Wonderland.
Big boards with words written on them in enormous letters were propped up against all the trees in the garden. Laurence Olivier had trouble remembering his lines and dad reported that when the director asked him at what point he planned on speaking in a certain scene, the pre-eminent actor replied with dignity: “I shall speak when I approach the dialogue.”
There was a little boy who was playing the part of my dad as a little boy when he was about my age. The little boy is now the grown-up actor Alan Cox. I watched him being wrapped up in blankets and given cups of tea while he waited around in his costume to do scenes. I didn’t know what my dad’s film was about exactly, but I recognised who that little boy was pretending to be – a shy and lonely kid, wandering around a big garden in the countryside with nothing to do but observe the peculiarities of his parents. A little boy who both felt terrified of his life beginning and was dying for it to hurry up and happen. I recognised it all because I was that kid too.
I remember watching a scene being filmed on our stairs which involved my dad as a little boy and his schoolfriend putting on a play for the grown-ups. In the scene, they pretend to be the ghosts of dead soldiers in the trenches of the First World War, and they get the terrible giggles. I did plays on those stairs too, but mine were much lower-brow offerings. I pretended to be Delia Smith measuring out flour and sugar into bowls. Sometimes I changed it up by recreating Persil Automatic adverts and once I acted out almost word for word a long-running TV series set in Edwardian times about posh people with lots of horses called Flambards.
I don’t know if I did plays on the stairs because that’s what my dad had done and I thought he’d approve (there’s a moment in the play when Elizabeth, the son’s disapproving wife, asks him, “Do you always copy your father?”). But I do know I was a shy and lonely child (my sister didn’t arrive until I was 13) who lived a lot in my imagination. Having been one of those himself, my dad was always deeply sympathetic. I think as much as anything else, A Voyage Round My Father presents a deep understanding of the strange isolation of childhood.
The filming came to an end and there was a wrap party. They set up lights and a sound system in the garden and laid down some wood on the lawn for a dance floor. I watched my mum in a long white dress dancing with some of the crew. I remember thinking how beautiful she was and wondering if I would ever get to dance like that. For months afterwards, we kept finding plastic cups and fake flowers pushed into the bushes – relics from the time everything turned upside down.
And then the big carnival of people and trucks and lights and trailers which had transformed our house into a film set disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared. The impermanence of it, the excitement, the immediate belonging, the way that real life got reflected back in the made-up life of a movie. The little boy who pretended to my dad as a little boy and who reminded me of me. All of it. The hall of mirrors of it all. I was totally, irredeemably smitten.
I spent the next 40 years acting in things, writing things, directing them. And through all of it I’ve been coming home to that house, as my brothers and sisters have too, bringing boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives and children, and seeing them run around the garden and put on plays of their own on the stairs.
During the filming of A Voyage Round My Father, my dad had watched Laurence Olivier pretend to die in the bed he’d watched his own father really die in. He heard the great actor say his father’s ridiculously play-worthy last words: “I’m always angry when I’m dying.” My dad died, not in the same bed, but in the same house, 30 years after the movie death of his pretend father, and 50 years after the actual death of his real one. A hall of mirrors.
A Voyage Round My Father is about an adored, larger-than-life father and the mark he made. In the play, my dad was remembering his own father and trying to understand him and maybe dispelling his power by writing about him. I wish I’d written about my dad like he did about his. I was scared to think about mine for a long time after he died because he was everything to me. If I thought about him too much, I felt as if I might die myself from sadness.
And then time passed and now I’ve forgotten so much. But to go and see Richard Eyre’s production of A Voyage Round My Father, my dad’s most personal bit of writing and the thing of his that feels the most personal to me, when it opens at the Theatre Royal Bath this week with my mum and my brothers and sisters and our kids, well it’s as good a way of remembering as I can think of.
Tickets: theatreroyal.org.uk