Romans in Britain is a disgrace to the NT. Its staging shows a singular lack of judgment on your part. Several of the audience left at the interval and some demanded their money back … I have no doubt that the GLC will be reconsidering its position vis-à-vis the NT at an early date. (Rosenthal; 324)

The telegram was kept from the company in order not to demoralise the performers. Cutler appeared on News at Ten to condemn the play. The media gleefully sniffed a story. The Daily Mail assigned no fewer than eight reporters to the play. And the play all but disappeared in the ensuing uproar, in much the same way Edward Bond’s Saved in 1965, and Sarah Kane’s Blasted was to do in 1995.

By the time the play opened, Brenton was something of a hate figure for the Tories, having co-written with Tony Howard a satirical attack about the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher, and her first year in office. Called A Short Sharp Shock, and first performed in June 1980, Mrs Thatcher is seen as a vicious nanny in a wheelchair pushed by Geoffrey Howe. Henchmen terrorise ‘wet’ backbenchers with chainsaws. Keith Joseph is mad, and gives birth to monetarism in the form of Milton Friedman, who erupts from Joseph’s stomach. Brenton was condemned in Parliament by the Arts minister. Despite not having seen the show, he managed to apologise for such a waste of public money.

Reviews of and comments about Romans ranged from the vitriolic to the condescending:

… there is such a vast disproportion between the extravagance of the form and the banality of the thesis … I accept totally that Mr Brenton finds the hunger for empire anathema; but in order to savage such a crucial historical phenomenon I suggest you first have to understand it. (Michael Billington, Guardian, 17 October 1980)

Its three hours are devoid of wit, beauty or drama, and the message it appears to offer us only surfaces in the closing scenes. (B. A. Young, Financial Times, 18 October)

This play is a nauseating load of rubbish from beginning to end. It is written in a ludicrous pseudo-poetic yob-talk; such themes as it possesses are banal beyond belief; and the intended bravery of the acting company amounts to no more than an embarrassing exhibitionism. (James Fenton, Sunday Times, 19 October)

… the play’s intellectual and political crudeness, its sentimental appeals to an Arthurian utopia and, sometimes, a lack of plausibility that lurches towards Pythonesque exorbitance. (Benedict Nightingale, New Statesman, 24 October)

… it is an underwritten and overproduced pageant which would look inadequate if performed as a school play. (Sheridan Morley, Punch, 29 October)

However, more considered views include those of Harold Hobson and Bernard Levin:

I categorically deny that there is any scene in that play which is as revolting as what happens to Gloucester in King Lear or to Oedipus in Oedipus Rex. Yet even school children are quite justifiably urged to see these plays.