John Mortimer's "A Voyage Round My Father" … is a rewarding but essentially trivial play. It is autobiographical, and Mr. Mortimer is telling the story of his father, a blind, curmudgeonly lawyer, who never let his disabilities get the better of him, but then, with his sour and easy wit, never got the better of his disabilities.

As a playwright Mr. Mortimer has always seemed to suffer from an inability to distinguish between a character and an eccentric. His portrait of his father is probably totaly truthful, but in dramatic terms it remains a caricature blandly begging for kindness. This father would be a bore if he had sight, and a rather nasty, self-opinionated bore at that. The fact that he was blind adds slightly to his interest, but not enough.

Clive Barnes, "London Season," in The New York Times (copyright © 1971 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by...