John Mortimer sees himself as a pretty traditional sort of playwright, in whom traditional influences are at work (Dickens, Chekhov, the Russian novelists), and feels that his admiration for the plays of Pinter and Simpson, the ideas of Osborne and Wesker, does not imply any very close kinship. Many of his critics, particularly those unequivocally, left of centre, have tended to agree with him, suggesting that though on a number of occasions he has been bracketed with 'new dramatists' … he is really an 'old dramatist' in disguise, writing 'in almost every respect typical Shaftesburiana', as a reviewer in Encore put it in connection with The Wrong Side of the Park.

Now there is something in this: certainly The Wrong Side of the Park in particular is nearer the sort of play which a British dramatist would be writing now if no real challenge to the supremacy of Rattigan had been heard in the theatre than almost any other new play by a writer under forty. But even here there are important differences, and when one looks more closely at Mortimer's one-act plays it rapidly becomes clear that he is after, on a more popular level, the same sort of thing as many of his contemporaries. His subject, like theirs, is more often than not the failure of communication, the confinement to and sometimes the liberation from private dream-worlds; his approach to language is not so far from that of, say, Alun Owen, involving the use of a hypersensitive ear for the way people really talk and a talent for selecting and heightening to produce a fully theatrical eloquence which yet carries the hallmark of reality….

[Mortimer] applies his exploratory techniques to the middle classes in decline rather than the working classes ascendant…. (p. 258)

[His] plays take place entirely in a seedy middle-class world of run-down private schools, draughty seaside hotels, nine-to-five offices and the shabbier corners of the courts. What Shall We Tell Caroline? and David and Broccoli are both set in schools, The Dock Brief, Two Stars for Comfort, and at least one of the sketches have law in the background, and so, in a more roundabout way, does I Spy, though it is set in a seaside hotel; most of the rest are about office workers at work or at home in faded but 'quite nice' suburbs on the wrong side of the park. The world they present is consistent in its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the mixture being a practical expression at once of Mortimer's views on what the writer should be doing in the modern world and what the dramatist specifically should be offering audiences in the theatre. (p. 259)

Mortimer's championship of 'the lonely, the neglected, the unsuccessful' is the more telling in that it is, strictly, an elevation of them and not a degradation of 'the others'—in Mortimer's plays there are no ready-made villains on whom the blame can be put ('This man would not be lonely and unsuccessful if it were not for …'); instead, the seedy and downtrodden are accepted on their own terms, as human beings, mixtures inevitably of good and bad qualities, and then without glossing over or minimizing the bad qualities, Mortimer gradually unfolds the good for our inspection.

The danger in this is obvious enough: that in showing all one's characters in the best possible light one will fall imperceptibly into the sort of sentimental whimsy favoured by Frank Capra and Robert Riskin in such thirties comedies as Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and You Can't Take it With You, in which each character tends to be established by some 'quaint', 'lovable' peculiarity (as though for a contemporary comedy of humours), and a fantasy world of good intentions is hopefully substituted for the real world in which, even at its most comic, everybody does not mean well. Up to now Mortimer has managed to avoid falling into this particular trap, though he is often near enough the brink for his audience to be aware of the danger. Partly it is his taste for the grotesque (Dickens is the obvious parallel here) which saves him, and partly his precise ear for the way people really talk, which enables him, by a sort of sleight of hand if nothing else, to give his plays a certain stiffening of reality whenever they look like going too soft on him. (pp. 260-61)

Mortimer is at his happiest when he does not have to explain directly, but can imply as much explanation as we are entitled to expect in the action of the play as it unrolls. For despite himself Mortimer seems to be at one with other dramatists of his generation in the belief that human behaviour cannot really be explained by some simple formula which makes everything clear; you cannot turn every play into a sort of whodunit—a why-did-he-do-it, perhaps—in which the clues are planted and then just before the curtain someone explains which was the one vital clue to explain a whole personality. Life is seldom if ever as clear-cut as that: all sorts of explanations may fit the facts, and any or all of them may be true; motives are generally so mixed that even the principals in any given event do not know quite why they are acting as they are. When, as in What Shall We Tell Caroline? or one or two of his later plays, Mortimer is content just to show us such a situation and leave us to 'explain' it how we will, the result is far more satisfactory than in his cut-and-dried pièces à thèse, since then the audience's imagination is quickened instead of deadened, and the dramatist is compelled to integrate cause (what would be explained) and effect (what is actually said and done in the present) into dialogue of a fairly uniform density, instead of letting his play disintegrate into wads of aimless, if for the instant quite entertaining, chatter among which are scattered occasional hard nodules of too clinical explanation.

Several of the later one-act plays offer good examples of this less direct technique, and so do a number of the revue sketches…. In these, obviously, the discipline of extreme brevity precludes explanation. The situations have to carry such explanation as they need as graphically and succinctly as possible—and the same applies slightly less forcibly in the one-acters for stage and television. In Lunch Hour, for example, we have what is in effect an extended sketch about a couple, a fairly respectable business-man and an office-girl, trying to find somewhere where they can make love in the lunch hour. He is not very expert, chooses a respectable boarding-house near a station and spins the landlady a story about having to talk something over quietly with his wife. But the secretary, being a simple unimaginative soul, begins to act as if what he has said is true, wants to know what was the business which was so urgent she should be summoned down from Scarborough to discuss it, and wonder if she ought to have anything to do with a man who can behave so heartlessly towards his (imaginary) loved ones. The joke is prolonged and elaborated much too far, but at least the characters are permitted simply to reveal themselves in what they say and do and the explanation ('Telling the truth is often a great concealment; we are given away by what we pretend to be') is kept for the preface to the published text.

In The Encyclopaedist …, the method is similar: an encyclopaedia salesman has three encounters with the same woman and sees three faces of her in three successive phases of her marriage, phases in which the question of knowledgeability plays an important part, hence the relevance of his encyclopaedias. And in Collect Your Hand Baggage we have another comedy of misunderstanding when Crispin, the forties bohemian surviving bravely into the sixties, decides to bestow himself as a favour on the daughter of his landlady, plain and therefore, he believes, loveless, only to find that she does not want him, has hardly noticed him, and is about to go off to Paris with someone else altogether. (This is an odd and none-too-well-balanced piece, since the role of the young people who accompany Crispin is never made clear, though they seem to have more significance than the sort of collective straight-man to him they are here required to be….) Too Late for the Mashed Potato is another television piece about the role of illusion in life, again very schematic in its demonstration of 'Lies for the sake of truth, infidelity for the sake of fidelity'; a husband revitalizes his marriage by pretending to flirt with a girl in a deserted Italian lakeside resort, and thus satisfying his wife's need for drama.

But arguably the most successful of all the later plays is Mortimer's second foray into the world of school, David and Broccoli…. Here the scene alternates between two of Mortimer's pet stalking-grounds, the old-fashioned, slightly disreputable private school in North London and a faded residential hotel cluttered with potted plants and tea-room wickerwork. The story is that of a timid, unathletic boy's fear of and animosity towards 'Broccoli' Smith, the rough, powerful, but slow-witted P.T. coach. He has his chance to get even with Broccoli when he discovers Broccoli's weakness—a passion for the elementary occultism of Everyman's Almanac of future events—and exploits it to such effect that he convinces Broccoli that the end of the world is due the very next Thursday, the day of the prize-giving, and thereby brings about a scene as a result of which Broccoli leaves under a cloud, with no other job open to him. Though the central premise of the plot is rather farfetched, the play scores by the precision with which the backgrounds are evoked and the unsentimental reality of the boys, particularly David, who is a fascinatingly accurate amalgam of overdeveloped intellect and undeveloped understanding: in his terror he sees no farther than the immediate object of his terror, and sees it as something to be disposed of at all costs. But even when Broccoli is routed and thoroughly cut down to size he feels, apparently, no particular compunction about having removed the one security in his victim's pathetic life: he is a child, yet he has vanquished a man, and that is enough. About children at least Mortimer has no illusions, and the end product, though evidently more fantasticated than What Shall We Tell Caroline? is as far away as that minor masterpiece from the sentimentality which always tends to soften unduly the sinister and grotesque elements in Mortimer's work.

As much can hardly be said for Two Stars for Comfort, his second full-length play, though it does in some respects show an advance on The Wrong Side of the Park: it is concentrated fairly and squarely on one character and the events which lead up to his belated moment of truth, and it resists the temptation to tie everything up too neatly with a cut-and-dried explanation of him and his way of life in the last five minutes. But these improvements are counterbalanced by the recurrence in exaggerated form of other faults from Mortimer's earlier work, notably the shameless reduction of minor characters (and even some major characters) to comedy-of-humours stereotypes, each tirelessly parroting variations of his or her idée fixe, and the tendency to play what is basically a rather slight and sentimental plot anecdote for considerably more than it is worth. (pp. 265-69)

The most obvious miscalculation in the play is Mortimer's apparent mistaking of this story, eminently suitable as it would be for one of his more insubstantial one-act comédies larmoyantes, for the real stuff of tragedy. Neither of the principal characters develops, they just change: Sam right at the end, when like his namesake in Call Me a Liar he is persuaded by the action of the girl he is involved with to forsake illusion and embrace reality; Ann, the girl, twice, first of all when she (predictably) succumbs to Sam's advances and the charms of a twirl of the drum-sticks, and then at the end when an unkind burlesque of her relationship with Sam staged by the other young people snaps her back, rather less explicably, to the realities of the situation. But the progression of their affair and the effect it has on them both is made the central theme of the play, a position it is far too weak to sustain. To support it Mortimer has in effect devised two contrasting choruses: the quartet of young people from Collect Your Hand Baggage, who represent presumably iconoclastic youth and vitality (though they appear rather softened and the 'bigger and more destructive part' they were intended to play is confined to their cathartic regatta-night entertainment), and the matching quartet of old regulars (the woman whose one subject of conversation is her vanished husband; the schoolmaster obsessed with local history, and so on). For the most part, in fact, these other characters are present just to fill in any gaps in the action with amusing and characterful conversation—which they do quite efficiently, though by this stage in Mortimer's work the device is becoming rather too mechanical for comfort, an over-glib way of inflating a slight inspiration to superficially imposing proportions.

Mortimer's latest full-length stage play, The Judge (1966) is more problematical. A judge at the end of his career comes to hold his last assizes in his home town, which he has never returned to during the previous forty years. Evidently he has come back to deal with some unfinished business; evidently, too, he is quietly going off his rocker. He talks darkly of past crimes he has allowed to go unpunished. He expects some sort of protest in court, some challenge of his fitness to judge, and we gather that the crime must be something he has done himself, or connived at, in his youth: it is himself first and foremost that he wants judged. And little by little, from his devious allusions, we can piece together that it was a guilty liaison with a girl living in the cathedral close, that he agreed to her having an abortion, and has been haunted by this, and the wrong he feels he then did her, ever since. Now he has come to square things, to face the accusation he feels must necessarily come from the girl, now a woman in late middle age keeping a run-down antique shop as a front for a sort of casually organized and perhaps largely amateur brothel. By half-time the judge has got a couple of his old schoolmates, now a doctor and a journalist on the local paper (and both regular visitors at 'Aunt Serena's') into such a tizzy that they are ready to start a witchhunt against Serena, whom they imagine to be the object of the judge's obscure fulminations, in order to take the heat off themselves. From this arise some rather unlikely plot manoeuvres, with Serena being not only ostracized by her regulars but set upon in the streets and chased home from the off licenses. And so, finally, to the inevitable confrontation between the judge and his past (Serena), from which, in a slightly unexpected way, he gains nought for his comfort, because not enough for his discomfort.

Basically, there is a good plot here, but in its treatment Mortimer has taken on several liabilities and then loaded things still further against himself by writing the play in the particular style he does. To begin with, it is surely important, for a plot so odd, highly charged and mysterious, that all the people involved should seem at the outset very ordinary and everyday. In particular, the judge, eaten up by a hidden obsession, should seem the model of correctness and sanity, instead of being presented as an evident nutcase from the start. Similarly, it would surely be more effective if his victim were a peacable, respectable body, keeping, perhaps, lodgings for girls studying at the local teacher-training college, instead of the garrulous old bore she is here, wildly over-characterized with endless requests that others should save her life with a ciggy and chats about the Fitzroy and the Café Flore over glasses of cheap vino. It would also help if the various twists and turns of the plot were better motivated. For example, why are the judge's schoolmates so terrorized by him? What can a judge do to clean up local morals in a town where he is holding assize if the police are not playing along with him, as here they patently are not? To remove things even further from familiar reality, the play is written for much of the time in Mortimer's most flowery and picturesque vein, with a number of long addresses straight to the audience which rely on telling us (very eloquently, to be sure) about the town and its atmosphere instead of showing us in the course of the dramatic action. Clearly at long last Mortimer has hit in this play on a plot capable of going the necessary length for a whole evening's entertainment; what a pity, then, that he has not hit on the right style to make it work.

Mortimer remains in many ways an unknown quantity among the new dramatists, if only because he appears too completely knowable. There is no noticeable development between The Dock Brief and The Judge: each successive work has shown the general expertise, the amazing skill and facility with dialogue, and the thorough practical grasp of the medium for which it was originally intended which marked the first play of all, and the most we can proffer, tentatively, by way of a subsequent discovery is that the full-length play may not be his forte and that he should eschew the temptation to point his moral too plainly. Mortimer's world is consistent and instantly recognizable, and he knows his way round it with complete certainty: the question now is will he find it in subsequent works the trap it looks now like becoming, or see it rather as a launching-pad to the discovery of fresh worlds elsewhere? His most recent work does not begin to provide the answer. (pp. 270-72)