7/3/2023 0 Comments John mortimer rumpole![]() ![]() ![]() This alone may give you a notion of how capacious a character he is. The male parent in this domestic drama has become an Oedipal image vastly taken to the hearts of theatergoers on several continents, and has been represented on the boards and on television by Mark Dignam, Alec Guinness, Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, and Derek Jacobi. In the name and figure of Horace Rumpole, old rogue and old hero of the Old Bailey, as impersonated-no, *incarnated-*by Leo McKern, we have someone for the ages, someone who will be available at need to our inner eye and ear every time it is demonstrated once again that “the law is a ass.” ![]() True immortality doesn’t depend on national considerations: it is given to very few people to create one imperishable fictional person, and then to see that very person take on life and flesh as if animated by Pygmalion. But don’t feel bad about that: instead, feel worse because now there isn’t such an Englishman either. Is there, in other words, anyone we can name who combines the qualities of a Dickensian or Shakespearean character with the grit and brio of a Clarence Darrow–style defense attorney (the above blend served slightly chilled with a definite hint of Kafka and perhaps a smidgen of Evelyn Waugh)? Well, no, there isn’t, and there never was such an American. On the bleak January day that John Mortimer died, at the age of 85, I was trying to think of an American “parallel” to his personality and position. ![]()
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