Reviews

Committed socialist and a political warhorse of the 20th century, Jay (Ian Cullen) has allowed his principles to become corrupted by an illegal arms scam that made him a millionaire but has now reduced him to an anguished figure, pacing his crummy bedsit while trying to see the funny side of a world torn by racial conflict, torture and carnage.

But his shadowy retirement is breached by his step-daughter – Harriet, played by Abigail Thaw, who offers him comfort in old age while wondering where all the money has gone – and by his long estranged daughter Jo (Helen Grace), looking to unravel the sec- rets of her father’s past and the events mentioned in her mother’s enigmatic suicide note, before starting a family of her own.

But Don Taylor’s wordy new play for the Orange Tree, which he also directs, is neither a character-driven family saga nor a coherent study of the political issues involved. Instead Jay adopts the moral high ground, launching into windy analyses of the world’s woes merely as a means of dodging questions whenever anyone gets too close.

The running time is only 2 hours 20 minutes but it seems longer. However, despite this his actors bring an absorbing presence to their roles, including Jonathan Dryden Taylor as Jo’s boyfriend.

Jay, a pensioner, spends his days in his squalid London flat railing against the greed and amorality of the last century. Like some superannuated Ben Elton, he delivers mock stand-up routines about globalisation, Third World sweatshops, Eastern European corruption and genetic engineering, knowing that there aren’t any funny punchlines.
Meanwhile Jo, the daughter he hasn’t seen for 25 years, wants to find out why this former 1960s radical became a successful businessman only to give his wealth away to some unknown recipient.

His stepdaughter Harriet, eager to protect Jay, simply knows that he nursed her ailing mother through her final months. She would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. Are Jay’s actions the result of altruism or guilt for a morally compromised life?

It takes an age to find out in Don Taylor’s stimulating but plodding discussion play. Through the various relationships he sets up, Taylor tries to chart how the eroded ideals of the 20th century have now left an apolitical “mental froth”. But in trying to cram in all the moral and philosophical concerns that have preoccupied him in his lengthy career as a playwright and BBC drama director, Taylor tends to bury his characters in rhetoric.

Back in the 1960s he was championing such playwrights as David Mercer on TV, but here he lacks Mercer’s deft mix of the political and the personal. Too many speeches sound as if they’ve been honed in a lecture room, and the set — two chairs on a chequered floor — adds to the feeling of being in a debating chamber.

The characters, too, seem more exemplary than real; Jo’s boyfriend Adam is simply there to represent faith in our technological future and a total disregard of the past. Attempts at more personal issues (was the car accident that killed Jo’s mother really suicide?) strike a hollow note.

The cast, under the direction of John Terry, who took over from a poorly Taylor, do well to animate these walking mouthpieces. Helen Grace has the toughest job as the intensely earnest Jo, saddled with such observations as “I feel like a woman blindfolded in a room full of razor blades”. But Ian Cullen brings a world-weary rage to Jay that keeps you listening even when his speeches have become a bit of a verbal slog.

Not a play to engage with easily, then. But at least The Road to the Sea is powered by a fierce passion, intelligence and broader world view that’s lacking in the adolescent hang-ups on a sofa that tend to dominate new writing on the fringe.

Rating: 3/5

In Don Taylor’s relishably intelligent but irksomely protracted new play, an angry, despairing old man called Jay, pacing a lonely Willesden flat, ponders the missed opportunities of the 20th century. He pictures New Year’s Eve, 1899, and the spirit of optimism that would have seized revellers in London as they looked to the future buoyed by advances in science and the march towards democracy; anyone who had stood up and predicted a century of war and genocide would have been roundly laughed at.

Although the fin de siecle retrospection of The Road to the Sea makes this Orange Tree premiere feel three years overdue, Jay’s gloom-laden overview still catches the despondent drift of our age and carries a raw urgency as conflict looms once more.

What’s most interesting, but also most problematic dramatically, is Taylor’s attempt to show how the fault for mankind’s failure lies not in some abstract process but in individual lapses of moral decency. Jay’s embittered cynicism flows from self-disgust, the precise source of which only becomes apparent following a series of visits from Jo, a daughter he hasn’t seen since the break-up of his first marriage. If I reveal, however, that this once idealistic man, a veteran of the ‘68 Paris evenements, ended up in the “import/ export” business, you’ll swiftly guess the damning line of work in which he became embroiled.

And that’s the problem: Jo’s obsessive quest to discover her father’s true identity feels unduly strung out when the character himself confides so much to the audience in his mock-comic monologues. Jay could divulge his guilty secret straight off were it not for the author’s strenuous contrivances.

It’s a long and winding road to some very open-ended questions, but you can’t help admiring Taylor’s determination to write a play with such a serious scope, disguising neither the preoccupations nor the prejudices of his generation. And, if the plotting flounders around, many individual lines and scenes ring quietly true.

Ian Cullen’s craggy-faced, grey-suited Jay is all splenetic conviviality - just the kind of person who’d be the most awkward, entertaining sod at a party. The other performances are equally well-judged: Helen Grace combines intensity and vulnerability as Jo, resisting the discouragements, both tender and harsh, of Jonathan Dryden Taylor as her insistently forward-looking partner and Abigail Thaw as her spiky step-sister. Taylor directs with cool precision, his minimal set consisting of just a couple of chairs. If only his self-editing had been as concise.

The Road To The Sea seems to be trying to say something important, but what exactly, is a difficult question.

The central character is Jay, brilliantly played by Ian Cullen, as a kind of King Lear meets Victor Meldrew. Jay, a man approaching seventy, spends his time pacing his dingy flat in Willesden, addressing his thoughts to an empty room.

Jay’s solipsistic routine is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of his estranged daughter Jo (Helen Grace). We are also introduced to Harriet (Abigail Thaw), Jay’s no-nonsense step daughter, and Adam (Jonathan Dryden Taylor), Jo’s long suffering boyfriend.

Jo becomes obsessed with her enigmatic father. Clearly he is a man with a past, and we are kept as much in the dark as she is. Adam can not understand her obsession and can see no good reason for raking up the past. Jo, however, is tormented and weighed down by her past, and seeks to liberate herself by confronting it.

The Road To The Sea touches on an array of contemporary concerns, from identity to genetics, from environmentalism to the end of ideology. It offers us a mirror to our times, but it is non judgemental and inconclusive. All we seem to be left with are self delusion and a variety of fatalisms.

Jay, it turns out, is what we use to call a cynical old lefty. The trouble is that Don Taylor’s characters are so wrapped up in themselves, that their worldviews are fatally clouded by their own experiences. This is a contemporary trend that we can witness in the way political analysis has given way to moralism and emotionalism, and that history is widely seen as a warning that anything we do will turn out for the worse.

The new fatalists believe that we can stop history and that is a dangerous delusion. There are also those who believe that the fragmentation of identity is something to celebrate. No it isn’t. If you wake up in the morning and you don’t know who you are, you are probably mentally ill.

That said, Don Taylor is a witty and intelligent writer and the performances of Ian Cullen and Helen Grace are well worth seeing.

I constantly moan about the lack of plays on big public themes. I cannot complain, therefore, if Don Taylor has here tackled the major betrayals of the 20th century. Even if the play sometimes feels like a series of personal columns, it proves that a four-hander can still have intellectual size and scale.
Taylor, who has translated Sophocles, knows all about the need for gradual revelation, and his play takes the form of an obsessive quest by a daughter, Jo, to discover the truth about her father, Jay, who abandoned the family home when she was four. What she cannot understand is how a radical idealist who was present in Paris in 1968 and who went on to acquire and sacrifice a fortune has wound up in a scruffy bedsit. Through nervy encounters with her father and ransacking old files, she slowly pieces together the story of a man whose multiple selves embody the damaged dreams of the past century.

Taylor’s play is full of echoes. Pacing up and down his room alone, Jay reminds one of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. His readiness to deliver impassioned monologues even suggests Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence. But where Osborne’s hero vented his spleen on 1960s England, Taylor’s walking Jay takes on board communism, Thatcherism, globalisation and a century of racial murder. In the absence of any real antagonist, it is left to us to challenge Jay’s pessimistic thesis: what, one feels like asking, about the advances in science and medicine that have made life better for large sections of the planet?

What is bracing, however, is to enter a public theatre and hear people discussing something larger than their emotional problems. There is even a shred of hope buried in Taylor’s play: the title stems from Xenophon’s story of the Greek army’s horrendous journey home after defeating the Persians and its sudden, joyous discovery of the sea.

Directed by the author and simply designed by Sam Dowson on a set comprising a tiled floor and two chairs, the piece is also performed with refreshing vibrancy. With his seamed features and lilting voice, Ian Cullen endows the mammoth role of Jay with the right heroic despair.

And Helen Grace lends his daughter a melancholic beauty that keeps one intrigued by a quest in which private needs and public nightmares fruitfully collide.

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