set sudden cups

In thousands for their blood.

(Wilfred Owen, Spring Offensive)

Those murdered in invasions can become earth-ghosts, and Romans gives the ghosts a voice; they sing of an old and deep love of the land, and speak well of those who worked it – a connection largely lost nowadays. The play says something simple but not simplistic: that invasion is wrong, that the earth remembers, and that those violated visit that violation on others in turn. All this seemed to make it a good choice for revival in 2006.

When Peter Hall originally commissioned The Romans in Britain back in 1978, he asked Howard Brenton ‘How are they going to talk?’ Re-reading it now, I’m struck by how completely successful Brenton’s dialogue is – rich, muscular, spare. Nobody else writes like this.

The play is really well structured, running timelines and myth forwards and backwards. It juggles a huge cast of characters expertly; there are no leads, and none star to the detriment of the story.

It’s also very funny – a fact obscured by the controversy surrounding the very first production, which seemed to suppose that if something was sickeningly violent, it couldn’t also be hilarious. At its best, Romans is both. And it has my favourite Act One curtain scene in all theatre.

In Sheffield, we were naturally apprehensive that reviving the most notorious play of the twentieth century would bring us the wrong sort of attention; there were threats of pickets, and at least one letter asking what we were going to do with That Scene (Act Three Scene One). The veteran designer Ralph Koltai, who was then entering his ninth decade, had created a huge tree-root 18 metres wide that spanned the stage. Under it was a pool, with both deep and shallow parts. Ralph was convinced that the assault of the druid, Marban, should take place on the edge of the water. It was a brilliant idea, and I’ll always be grateful to him for it. The walls of spray sent up by the Third Soldier (Christian Bradley) as he attempted to rape Marban (Dan Stevens) were shocking. We were forced to imagine what they concealed. The scene remains a tour de force, comedy shot through with violence and tenderness.

In the event, the pickets never materialized. On press night a touring production of Jerry Springer: The Opera was also opening up the road in Leeds; perhaps we split the Moral Majority vote.

It’s not easy reviving a play as big as Romans. The National did it with a cast of 37; we managed with a brilliantly talented 21 (and only two dogs, not six, by special permission of the author). We had to plan the entire season around it. But it remains a show I’m immensely proud of, and was, I believe, a good use of public funding: returning plays to the repertoire is one of the things subsidized theatres do best.

The 2006 Sheffield production remains the only full-scale professional revival of this remarkable work. I’m sure there will be others, though they may never again have casts as big as in 1980. When I saw ours on the last night, it had become what I always wanted it to be: a dirty, adventurous, provoking evening – a good night out, in fact.