Dear Lupin Read online

  Roger Mortimer & Charlie Mortimer

  DEAR LUPIN

  adapted for the stage by

  Michael Simkins

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Original Production

  Characters

  A Note on the Text

  Dear Lupin

  About the Authors

  Copyright and Performing Rights Information

  Dear Lupin was first produced by Martyn Hayes, Kenny Wax, TC Beech and Michael Watt, and performed at the Theatre Royal Windsor on 14 March 2015. The cast was as follows:

  ROGER MORTIMER

  James Fox

  CHARLIE MORTIMER

  Jack Fox

  Director

  Philip Franks

  Designer

  Adrian Linford

  Lighting Designer

  Johanna Town

  Composer and Sound Designer

  Matthew Bugg

  Choreographer

  Simeon John-Wake

  The production toured the UK, culminating in a run at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, from 3 August 2015.

  Characters

  ROGER MORTIMER

  CHARLIE ‘LUPIN’ MORTIMER, his son

  A Note on the Text

  In the original production, the play was set in Lupin’s imagination and memory, recalling his long-dead father.

  However the play is staged, the priority should be to ensure that the action flows seamlessly from one scenario to another without the need for complex scene changes or props which might slow the dramatic drive. Both characters should use whatever props and scenery is to hand to depict and inhabit the world of the play.

  Similarly, any changes of costume to denote the advance of time should not be allowed to hold up the action. Apart from Lupin’s change into Army battledress in Act One and Roger’s change from his normal clothes into pyjamas and dressing gown towards the end of Act Two, changes should kept to a minimum.

  ACT ONE

  Darkness. A room, dimly seen.

  Various items of furniture, some covered with dust sheets. A chaise longue, a wardrobe, a stepladder, a child’s rocking horse, a drinks tray, an old microwave cooker, a foldaway bed, shelves, books, paintings, tea chests, chests of drawers, general clutter; anything, in fact, which can be used to help tell the story.

  We hear a chorus of the ‘Eton Boating Song’ picked out softly with one finger on a piano.

  A figure is standing in the darkness, looking about him, as if visiting somewhere filled with memories from long ago. As the ‘Eton Boating Song’ reaches its last note we snap to –

  Sound of the theme to Mastermind.

  Simultaneously, the figure whips off the dust sheet to reveal a black-leather chair upholstered with chrome armrests now picked out by a single piercing spotlight.

  Meanwhile a man approaches and sits. He’s in his mid-fifties, dressed in a rumpled cardigan, corduroy trousers and scuffed suede shoes.

  The figure has now become the QUIZMASTER (note: the following exchange should commence normally but be played at increasing speed).

  QUIZMASTER. Your name?

  ROGER. Roger Mortimer.

  QUIZMASTER. Your occupation?

  ROGER. Geriatric racing hack and long-suffering father.

  QUIZMASTER. Your chosen subject?

  ROGER. Roger Mortimer.

  QUIZMASTER. Roger Mortimer, welcome to Celestial Mastermind. You have two minutes on Roger Mortimer, your time starts… now. You once gave the definition of a gentleman as being what?

  ROGER. Someone who gets out of the bath to do a pee.

  QUIZMASTER. Correct. You were born in 1909 in Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea. In 1930 you joined the Coldstream Guards, fighting at Dunkirk and spending four years as a POW. Upon touching back down on English soil in 1945, what was the first thing you did?

  ROGER. Went to a properly flushing lavatory with a copy of The Times.

  QUIZMASTER. Correct. You met your wife Cynthia Denison-Pender in 1947. What was your most memorable wedding gift?

  ROGER. A set of Viyella pyjamas. Having worn them on our honeymoon my wife sent them to a local laundry, who boiled them. I returned them with a note saying ‘Please donate these to a deserving dwarf.’

  QUIZMASTER. Correct. In 1947 you became a racing correspondent and subsequently wrote the definitive history of the Derby. What did you claim were the only three uses for the book?

  ROGER. It’s too large for my wife to throw at me; if the leg falls off the billiard table it’s big enough to prop it up; and in case of nuclear attack it’ll provide sufficient lavatory paper to last up to four years.

  QUIZMASTER. Correct. Your wife, who in later years could be somewhat excitable, once climbed onto the roof of the family home and threatened to throw herself off. What was your advice to the children?

  ROGER. Don’t worry, while she’s up there we can ask her to adjust the TV aerial.

  QUIZMASTER. Correct. Who was your racing hero?

  ROGER. Sir Gordon Richards.

  QUIZMASTER. Your favourite racecourse?

  ROGER. Newbury.

  QUIZMASTER. Your least favourite?

  ROGER. Goodwood. It’s more redolent of dog racing at Slough.

  QUIZMASTER. Favourite hobbies?

  ROGER. Forty winks.

  QUIZMASTER. Favourite food?

  ROGER. Salmon kedgeree –

  QUIZMASTER. Favourite drink?

  ROGER. A double –

  QUIZMASTER. Evening out?

  ROGER. One that ends early –

  QUIZMASTER. Clothes?

  ROGER. Anything without a tie.

  QUIZMASTER. Music?

  ROGER. Slow march from Figaro.

  QUIZMASTER. Actor?

  ROGER. Richard Briers.

  QUIZMASTER. Actress?

  ROGER. Ginger Rogers.

  QUIZMASTER. TV programme?

  ROGER. Mastermind.

  QUIZMASTER. Colour?

  ROGER. Yellow.

  QUIZMASTER. Flower?

  Beat.

  ROGER. Lupin…

  The lights snap up on the QUIZMASTER, who is revealed to be LUPIN.

  LUPIN. Roger Mortimer, you’ve scored a record-breaking thirty-five points, with no passes…

  Sound of applause.

  ROGER. Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name.

  LUPIN. Your son, Dad. Lupin.

  ROGER. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before…

  ROGER settles back, opens a copy of The Sunday Times and disappears behind it.

  LUPIN (now addressing the audience). To the racing-going public he was plain Roger Mortimer. To us, he was simply ‘Dad’, or ‘the old boot’. When he died, The Sunday Times obituary hailed him ‘one of the greats in racing journalism’, The Daily Telegraph called him ‘the pre-eminent historian of the turf’, while The Times wrote that he was ‘one of the most refreshingly candid correspondents of his or any other generation’. Not bad for a man whose only wish in life was to end up in a nursing home on Brighton seafront overlooking the nudist beach.

  Lights reveal a desk, on which sits a typewriter.

  (Walking across to the desk.) After his death I inherited this – his desk – at which he’d bashed out weekly articles for over thirty years. Dad always said there was no money to be had in writing about racing –

  ROGER. Of course not. Half the racing world can’t read and the other half are skint –

  LUPIN. – yet it allowed him to bring up a large family in some comfort, including my mother, known to everyone simply as ‘Nidnod’ – myself – my two sisters, Turpin the mongrel, Moppet the cat, Pongo the Dalmatian, Cringer the fox terrier, plus
two chihuahuas, Peregrine and Baron Von Otto.

  I was also bequeathed his typewriter – and his panama hat. (Produces the hat.) But the best thing about inheriting all his clobber was that I could reunite them with these…

  He produces a bundle of letters. ROGER sees them and reacts with some astonishment.

  ROGER. Good grief. Are those what I think they are?

  LUPIN. A hundred or so letters – composed by the old boot on this typewriter, at this desk, and with that panama wedged on his head. In all honesty I don’t know how I’d managed to retain them, given what Dad always called my ‘unorthodox lifestyle’.

  ROGER. That’s a euphemism for ‘unrepentant spiv’.

  LUPIN (opening one at random). They’d lain in my flat for a couple of decades, and apart from reading out the odd one for the delectation of my friends, I’d hardly glanced at them.

  Sound of the gentle lilt of classical music.

  But then one evening I was offered a free ticket to a box at the Royal Ballet. La fille mal gardée. Choreography by Frederick Ashton. Sets by Osbert Lancaster. The one with the clog dance. Having had no previous experience of ballet, I’d always subscribed to my dad’s view – what was it you used to say about going to see ballet, Dad?

  ROGER (looking up). On the whole I’d sooner have a tooth extracted without gas.

  The music starts to swell.

  LUPIN. I’m not quite sure what made me think of Dad’s letters that night. Was it the theme of the ballet – the efforts of a loving parent to bring up a wayward child – or Peter Hertel’s evocative music? Or simply the feeling of melancholy brought on by the all the drink and drugs sloshing about in my system? Whatever it was, upon returning home I retrieved the letters, opened one at random, and began to read. (Opens a letter.)

  ROGER (quietly). Dear Lupin.

  LUPIN. As I read, Dad re-emerged through the mists of time and I saw him again as I’d once known him: a patient, forbearing, long-suffering and thoroughly respectable middle-class gentleman. I also began to appreciate something I’d not noticed during my years of drunken hedonism: the affection and wisdom imparted to me over three decades in a noble, if fruitless effort to stop me from going off the rails.

  ROGER (from behind the paper). All right, no need to go overboard.

  LUPIN puts down the box.

  LUPIN. ‘You should show these to a wider audience,’ suggested someone at a dinner party a few weeks later.

  He turns to ROGER.

  What do you think, Dad?

  ROGER (looks up). Are you asking for my participation in an amateur theatrical?

  LUPIN. Only if you’re not doing anything.

  ROGER. What’s in it for me?

  LUPIN. Nothing much, apart from possibly a touch of posthumous notoriety. You’re not doing much just now are you?

  ROGER. I suppose not. It’s pretty quiet up here. And the crossword will keep. But for God’s sake don’t overstay your welcome. Don’t invite me to dance, don’t ask me to dress up as a woman, don’t advertise me as an engaging raconteur – in my experience that’s always double-speak for a long-winded bore – and try and work some Gilbert and Sullivan into it. They always jolly things along.

  LUPIN. It’s a deal.

  ROGER reaches beneath his chair and produces an old-fashioned radio microphone.

  ROGER. Well, get on with it then.

  LUPIN (turning to the audience). This – (Plonks the letters on the desk.) is their story.

  Sound of 1960s original Grandstand theme tune over thundering hooves.

  It all begins on April 4th 1952 when I arrive kicking and screaming into the world in my mother’s bedroom at Budds Farm.

  By now ROGER is standing with the microphone and binoculars and commencing a breathless commentary.

  ROGER. And approaching Becher’s Brook for the second time there’s still no change in the order, with Freebooter starting to fade, Teal going well and Wot No Son showing up on the rails…

  Sound of wild cheering, Grandstand theme swelling, hooves coming ever closer.

  LUPIN (finding the child’s rocking horse). At the time I can have no idea what a gloriously dysfunctional family I’ve been born in to – and neither has Dad, if only because he’s two hundred miles away at Aintree, commentating on the Grand National.

  ROGER. And Teal jumps clear at the Canal Turn and into the final straight and Teal has drawn clear –

  LUPIN (now riding the rocking horse). PUSH, MUM, PUSH!

  ROGER. And it’s Teal leading by a neck, and into the last and it’s Teal leading Legal Joy in second with Wot No Son in third –

  LUPIN (louder still). Go on, Mum, deep breaths, lengthen your stride, you can do it –

  ROGER. – and Teal is the winner of this year’s Grand National!

  Sound of a newborn baby screaming its lungs out.

  And some lucky punter will be celebrating tonight…

  He fishes out a betting slip from his pocket, which he scrutinises with disdain.

  (To himself.) Though sadly not this one…

  LUPIN. I’ve arrived!

  ROGER. Bugger.

  He tears up the slip and scatters it like confetti.

  LUPIN (producing a faded exercise book). Back at home, Mum writes in my blue baby book: ‘Charles himself was the happiest of babies, so placid, so amiable, so easy…’

  ROGER turns to LUPIN.

  ROGER. Your mother never was much of a judge of character.

  Sound of John O’Hare’s famous commentary on the 1967 Grand National.

  LUPIN (as commentary fades). The very first letter arrives exactly fifteen years later, on April 18th, 1967.

  ROGER (typing away). Dear Charles, I suppose writing a serious letter to you is about as effective as trying to kick a thirty-tonne block of concrete in bedroom slippers, but I’m a glutton for punishment as far you’re concerned.

  We hear the ‘Eton Boating Song’ once more.

  LUPIN (starting to dress in an item or two of his old school uniform). I’m now in my second year at Eton – Eton College, my dad’s old school. Dad?

  ROGER. Ah! The ‘Eton Boating Song’.

  LUPIN. Shall we dance?

  ROGER (ruefully). I knew this was a terrible idea…

  ROGER rises, and the two commence a stilted slow waltz in time to the music. Whoever is talking at the time turning their partner so they speak to the audience over the other’s shoulder.

  LUPIN (putting on a boater). Dad’s fifty-eight, a gallon of petrol costs five shillings, and the most popular TV series is The Forsythe Saga.

  They turn.

  ROGER. The best piece of advice I can give you about your life is simply to try to have a good time without making a fool or a shit of yourself.

  They turn.

  LUPIN. Eton in 1967 is a world of its own, with archaic rituals and a uniform to match – stiff collar, pinstripe trousers, white tie, all topped off with an Eton tailcoat.

  They dance.

  BOTH. ‘And it’s swing, swing together,

  Your body between your knees.

  And it’s swing, swing together,

  Your body between your knees…’

  The music ends.

  ROGER (ripping the page from the typewriter and reading aloud). I hope you’re well and settling in to your new term at Eton. It’s grey and cold here and I’m not at my best today as I think I’ve given myself a slight hernia bending down to cut my toenails with my gardening shears. Your mother hauled me off to the Newbury Agricultural Show last week where I was rewarded with a glass of tepid Cyprus sherry in the presidential tent, dispensed by an enigmatic teenager called Jamie who greeted me with an effusive bonhomie which I could have happily done without. For want of nourishment I purchased something called a hamburger sandwich; it was like eating a warm slug.

  LUPIN (producing an enamel bowl and a jug of water). Each morning the boys’ maid arrives to fill my washbasin with just enough lukewarm water to clean my face.

  ROGER (pouri
ng himself a drink). Your mother and I took Otto the chihuahua to the Newbury dog show this afternoon. While we were waiting to enter the show ring, one of the other competitors announced: ‘My dog did very well. He got a first, a second and was highly commended.’ I felt like replying: ‘Mine did all right too. He had a fight, a fuck, and was highly delighted.’ Later on I was chatting away to the judge when a jolly, middle-aged lady bounced up and announced that she’d just won first prize in the Rough Bitches class. Your mother had quite a lot to drink and her wig slipped to an increasingly jaunty angle. She never stopped talking complete balls for a single second.

  LUPIN. After which it’s an hour’s Latin before breakfast.

  ROGER. Today she is confined to barracks with a sore throat, caused, in my view, by talking too much without appropriate pauses for thought. She’s off to Jersey tomorrow for a boating holiday, leaving me to lead a relaxed life having meals and watching TV when I want to, and not feeling under any obligation to pretend I’m deaf.

  ROGER pours himself a drink.

  I think from now on I will call you Lupin after Mr Pooter’s disreputable son in Diary of a Nobody. Cheers!

  He takes a hefty swig. As he does so LUPIN undoes his collar and retrieves some filter papers from the brim of his boater.

  LUPIN. The name sticks. From now on, except when he’s exasperated or annoyed (which is about twice a week), he always begins his letters with ‘Dear Lupin’. Dad once said that boys who fail to make their mark at either work or games try to gain a reputation as lawbreakers or defyers of authority; a theory I confirm from day one when I commence on a lifelong ambition to become what the police like to call a ‘spiv’.

  He begins rolling a ciggie.

  ROGER. Dear Lupin, owing to lack of communication on your part, I have not the remotest idea of what is going on. Please don’t commit some act of folly that could have dire consequences for yourself. It’s all too easy to go off the rails at Eton and once off it is not easy to get back on again.

  By now LUPIN has also found a bottle of pale ale and a copy of the Racing Post.

  LUPIN. Whatever his initial hopes for me, by my sixteenth birthday they amount to little more than hoping I won’t be taken away in a Black Maria –