Reviews

How many dreams did the 20th century shatter?

For Jay (Ian Cullen), what that new century ushered in was unparalleled hope for the future of humankind, a hope he inherited as a “red” child of the 1930s, a political theoretician of the ’50s and an activist of the ’60s, spending the nights of the Paris spring in discussion with Marcuse as students and Renault workers marched and de Gaulle prepared to flee.

Yet, as another new century dawns, he paces the floor of his seedy Willesden flat, talking to himself - and, occasionally, his downstairs neighbour George - telling jokes with no punchlines and no laughs.

Into this world of despair walks Jo (Helen Grace), the cool, blonde, beautiful daughter of the woman he left a quarter of a century before, determined to exhume the past in a dangerously obsessive search for the true character of the father whose contradictions she cannot fathom.

It’s a past Jay is not keen to relive, but facts are gradually forced into the daylight - a lovingly cared-for wife’s death, unexpected familiarity with power lunches, lost wealth, sudden disappearance from the limelight.

For Jo, the question is whether her father’s reticence and hostility is the result of greed, shame or the malevolence that she believes her mother described in a secret letter before her suicide.

For Jay, the fear is that the ghosts that haunt him will also come to haunt the daughter that he is afraid to allow into his life.

Don Taylor’s play, which he also directs, is an erudite, eloquent, engrossing and beautifully performed examination of that now much-derided but profoundly important battleground, where the personal is political - where relationships, hopes, dreams, fears, personal strengths and failings, loss and so much else all help to shape our political consciousness.

Cullen and Grace are outstanding as the father and daughter, while Abigail Thaw as Jay’s stepdaughter Harriet, gives a convincing and sympathetic portrayal of a woman self-possessed, totally detached and yet strangely admirable in her ability to love a person’s deeds, whatever their motivation, without necessarily loving the person.

The character of Jo’s businessman boyfriend Adam (Jonathan Dryden Taylor) is more ambiguous and less convincing, but both Taylors manage to imbue him with enough humanity to suggest that he will not be an entirely negative influence on the future.

The play is undoubtedly wordy and the production - a bare stage and two chairs - offers nothing to distract one’s attention from the characters and dialogue.

The first half is maybe a little slow, the truth of Jay’s transformation from intellectual political powerhouse to shambling eccentric, when it emerges, is not entirely convincing and the climax of the play might be seen as rather prosaic.

What the burghers of Richmond will make of it is anyone’s guess and hats off to Sam Walters, again, for staging what is undoubtedly a difficult and uncommercial work.

In its reflection of the contradictory mix of faith and disillusionment that so many of us feel from time to time and in its belief in the potentially redemptive power of love, The Road To The Sea is honest, optimistic and moving.

The Shelley reference at the end reinforces its most powerful message, that you cannot kill the idea. You rarely get something that meaningful to take home with you from the theatre.