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.
· Until March 15. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
