As the last scene started, a boy in front of me, perhaps 14, turned to his father and whispered, ‘Now there are SIX dead people on stage. How cool is that?’

July 2014

Introduction

Philip Roberts

Context

Howard Brenton was in his mid-thirties when he began to write The Romans in Britain. By that time, he had created a formidable body of work, which amounted to 18 stage plays, four plays for television, a film, several adaptations, and some collaborative pieces. His Weapons of Happiness had been performed in the Lyttleton auditorium of the recently opened National Theatre on London’s South Bank. It was the first new play to be seen there.

The 1970s was a tumultuous decade, presided over by four Prime Ministers. Edward Heath, elected in 1970, declared five states of emergency during his time. He had to deal with strikes by, inter alia, dockers, refuse collectors, electricians, and, crucially, the miners.

He called a General Election in 1974, with the central question of ‘Who governs Britain?’, and lost marginally to Labour’s Harold Wilson. Heath was replaced as Leader of the Tories by Margaret Thatcher, who watched Wilson, and subsequently, James Callaghan, try to deal with the highest rate of inflation since 1914 at 27 per cent. Though inflation dropped by 1978 to below 10 per cent, early in 1979 the largest industrial action took place since the General Strike of 1926. On 3 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.

Throughout the decade, the problem of the British occupation of Northern Ireland grew. In January 1971, there were 16 IRA bomb attacks in Ulster, increasing to 38 the following month. The British government put in place internment without trial. At the beginning of 1972, 13 unarmed people were blown up in Derry by the British army. ‘Bloody Sunday’, as it became known, was followed by an escalation in the violence. The IRA brought its campaign to the mainland. As the decade closed, Airey Neave, one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest friends, was assassinated, as was Lord Mountbatten, a member of the Royal family.

Brenton, along with colleagues, had been preoccupied by the British in Ireland, early in the decade. He, and six other writers, had built a play in 1972 called England’s Ireland, an analysis of British political activity in Northern Ireland since the 1920s. Brenton said: ‘It was obvious that England’s Ireland had to be written. It was obvious to all of us that none of us could write sufficiently on it by himself, being English … I think it got nearer to the situation than many of the Irish plays we’ve seen recently’ (Gambit vol. 6, 1973). In the February, 1971 issue of Plays and Players, Brenton had signalled his intention to move from the theatrical fringe into the centre of British theatre and the big stages:

… someone’s got to go in first and start doing something. The question is, will new writing actually work on a big stage at the National? … if the National is to be in any sense national, then it’s got to be about England today and that means new writing. You can go on forever as a playwright earning your living in cultural cul-de-sacs playing to 30 people a night: I now want to be tested on a big scale.