Legal Fictions

Published Monday 3 March 2008 at 10:55 by John Thaxter

Billed as ‘A Comedy by John Mortimer’, this is in fact a double bill of two of his radio plays with witty texts as thick as clotted cream, which Edward Fox gets his tongue around with patrician relish. But the actor’s elaborately elongated vowels and mannered delivery can make his lines hard to follow.

In The Dock Brief, Mortimer’s first success, Fox plays a failed barrister who has haunted the Bailey for years hoping to pick up a pauper’s brief and win a last chance to make his name. But he gets stuck with Nicholas Woodeson’s lugubrious Fowle, a tradesman who killed his wife when she refused to go off with the lodger, and is eager to confess.

Undaunted, Morgenhall and his bemused client rehearse flights of fantasy to impress both judge and jury. But in the closing scene the post-trial outcome is both anecdotal and implausible, the payoff signalled to the audience long before Fox’s lofty departure.

Following the interval, in Edwin (written in 1982), we discover Fox as Sir Fennimore Truscott, a retired hanging judge sitting under the mulberry in his garden at Gallows Corner, trying his neighbour for unlawfully rogering Lady Margaret Truscott.

Woodeson’s chirpy potter from next door is a merciless tease, and there is a graceful, beautifully measured performance from Polly Adams as Lady Truscott. But between the judicial felicities, and with the imminent arrival of the unseen Edwin, son of the title, the play raises questions of paternity that will remind older playgoers of Robert Morley’s Edward, My Son.

Both Christopher Morahan’s staging and Fox’s star turn, like well-crusted port, won warm words from critics during the pre-London tour. But for an evening stretching to just under three hours, the two plays together have neither the substance nor variety to sustain its length.