the feeling was that with the passing of the years there would be little to cause offence to an audience in 1989, and that since the initial court case had never been resolved there was little chance of a new attempt by any party.

In his Preface to volume 2 of his Collected Plays, Brenton, some seven or eight years after the National’s production of the play, reflected on the media frenzy and the disgraceful hounding of Bogdanov and concluded:

And yesterday’s scandals evaporate and here is the play, readable and, I think, very much alive. I am immensely proud of it. I’m confident that it will be eventually revived on the British stage and have its day. Future audiences may or may not like the piece, but I’m sure of one thing: they will say – ‘what was all that fuss about, years ago?’

Twenty six years after its premiere, the play did have its day. Samuel West, the then Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres, chose The Romans in Britain as his first production on the Crucible stage. It opened in February, 2006. West noted in the programme:

A quarter of a century ago the debut of this extraordinary play was eclipsed by controversy. I hope that we can now forget the legal history and focus on Howard Brenton’s tale, which remains as pertinent today as in 1980.

Brenton noted in the Guardian for the 28 January 2006 that ‘there has been no full-scale professional production on the kind of big, major stage for which the play was designed’:

I am in my 60s. Watching Sam West’s actors rehearse this play by a writer who was in his 30s is a kind of unnerving time travel. I’ve been in dialogue with my former writer self. There was an edgy desperation in the late 1970s: the cold war was in deep freeze, the conflict in Ireland was escalating, the British Labour movement was tearing itself apart, and, in the streets, unemployed youth sported post-punk, multi-coloured mohican hairstyles. Inevitably, the play has echoes of that era. One of the young British Celts even talks of gelling his hair … There was a sense of things beginning to fall apart. It’s marked how in many scenes people listen, trying to hear something in the trees, or strain to see something just out of sight, that is dangerous and coming for them. The play is shot through with premonitions that the unimaginable is about to happen. In a way it did: Margaret Thatcher arrived.

Brenton in the same article makes the connection with today’s world:

I hope it can give audiences in Sheffield a good night out. They may also see contemporary parallels. Is America our Rome? The Trinovantes, a powerful tribe in what is now Essex and Suffolk, were in an abject alliance with the Romans, just as we are with Washington today. All the way from here to the Iran-Iraq border, an imperial power is barging around the world believing that it alone holds the keys of ‘civilization’, as dangerous as Caesar’s legions.