Mortimer, John Clifford

Mortimer, John Clifford (1923– ), English dramatist, by profession a barrister, whose aim, in his own words, is to chart ‘the tottering course of British middle-class attitudes in decline’. His first plays, the one-act The Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline? (1958), were produced in a double bill (NY, 1961); they were followed by another one-acter, Lunch Hour (1961). His first full-length plays were The Wrong Side of the Park (1960), in which Margaret Leighton played a woman whose illusions about her dereased first husband prevent her from making a success of her second marriage, and Two Stars for Comfort (1962), about the involvement with a young woman of the middle-aged owner of a riverside inn. Mortimer then prepared an English version of Feydeau's farce Une puce à l'oreille as A Flea in Her Ear (1965) for the National Theatre, and after a somewhat non-naturalistic play, The Judge (1967), and a second translation from Feydeau—Un fil à la patte as Cat among the Pigeons (1969)—returned to the one-act form with Come as You Are (1970), four playlets set in different parts of London. They were followed by an autobiographical play, A Voyage round My Father, produced at the Haymarket Theatre in 1971, where the role of the Father was played first by Alec Guinness and then by Michael Redgrave. In the same year an adaptation of Zuckmayer's The Captain of Köpenick was seen at the National Theatre. I, Claudius (1972) was based on two novels by Robert Graves, and later plays were Collaborators (1973), in which a husband and wife collaborate in writing a film about their marriage, Heaven and Hell (1976), another double bill, and The Bells of Hell (1977), which depicts the Devil arriving at the home of a trendy South London vicar. Two more translations from Feydeau, The Lady from Maxim's (1977) and A Little Hotel on the Side (1984), were also seen at the National Theatre.