Trying To Unravel The Past… (The Richmond and Twickenham Times) February 2003
The Orange Tree is presenting a new play from this week - The Road To The Sea is written and directed by Don Taylor. The cast includes Ian Cullen, Helen Grace and Abigail Thaw, who are newcomers to the Orange Tree, and Jonathan Dryden Taylor, who was in the theatre’s recent production of Vaclav Havel’s The Beggar’s Opera.
Earlier this week I spoke to Helen Grace.
“I have been to see plays at the Orange Tree lots of times,” she told me. “This is the first time I have worked here and I’m enjoying it very much. It is a great theatre.”
The plot concerns Jo, a young woman who is determined to discover the identity of her estranged father. Jay, her father, is equally determined to protect the privacy of his past. As she pieces the story together, she is led on a dangerous journey into personal and public histories. Written in the year 2000, the play also looks at the meanings the millennium had for different generations. While one group of people celebrate the vision and potential of the next century, another mourn the ideas of the last.
“I am playing the part of Jo,” Helen Grace went on. “It is a fascinating part because she is such an interesting character. She had a very traumatic upbringing - as well as the fact that her father abandoned she and her mother, the mother herself died, or perhaps committed suicide when Jo was only nine years old.”
“Perhaps because of this awful childhood, she has become a very strong person, as often happens with people who have tragedies to copie with. She is a tenacious person embarking on a real quest, a real search - and I think the audience will empathise with her fears.
The reason she sets out on this quest is that she has met the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with and she wants to fill the gaps in her past. ”
She wants to know why her father disappeared and never made any attempt to get in touch, not even when the mother died. In her first visit for years, her father asks her why she has come and she replies ‘Justice.’”
“This reply throws her father - but then he has something to hide. At the end there is a sort of resolution - but it leaves a question - do we have to search for parts of our past or are some things better left alone?”
I live in Muswell Hill and as long as the Silverlink line is behaving, it’s a grand way to get to Richmond and so far it has been just fine. It is definitely one of London’s treasures when it is on form!”
