Interviewed in 1979 (Performing Arts Journal, Winter), he referred to ‘a monster of a play I’ve just finished’, and described it, and plays like it as,

big, in cast, staging, theme, and publicly declared ambition (they do want to change the world, influence opinion, enter fights over political issues); they are ‘Jacobean’ in a mix of the tragic and comic taking great pleasure in the surprises and shocks of entertainment the huge stage can arm the playwright with as a showman; they are epic in that they are many scened, full of stories, ironic and argumentative, and deliberately written as ‘history plays for now’.

Before Weapons of Happiness opened in the Lyttleton auditorium, Peter Hall had already offered Brenton a further commission, particularly with the Olivier in mind. Brenton said later:

All I had was this one image of Caesar walking towards a dead Celt with a knife in his hand. Just that. I told Peter Hall and he commissioned the play. (Boon: 181)

The result, written over three years and through three drafts, was Romans. A starting point came from his primary school, where he recalled a picture of Caesar’s legions crossing the Thames. He was nine years old. From 1978–9, Brenton was Resident Writer at the University of Warwick, where he wrote most of the play, and where he was given three objects by a friend: a stone-age hand axe, and two fragments of pottery, one Celtic, one Roman. On a visit to a Roman camp at Chesterton, one of his sons picked up a piece of Roman floor tile: ‘While I wrote the play I’d often have these bits and pieces on the table by my typewriter. They were like a map of the play, or a mantra, a key: I’d stare at them when I was stuck’. When he began, ‘the greatest difficulty I had … was what to do about a sense of overwhelming sorrow, a grief for the nameless dead, with which the material of the play is drenched’ (Hot Irons: 31; 118–19).

Brenton ‘planned a first draft “full of inaccuracies and wild scenes, but getting the weight and nature of the beast”’ (Rosenthal: 321), and then found the second part of the play difficult to resolve. An early draft of the play contained only one scene set in Ireland, while there are scenes set in Chichester’s British home, where what is seen is a military, catholic family. There’s a father killed in action in Cyprus; a radical sister who is also an IRA supporter; and a mother consumed with grief about her husband. Essentially, the passions and convictions of Chichester’s family are absorbed by him, and he is thus central to the structure of Part Two. In the final version, the mother is mentioned briefly, and the sister not at all.

The Play

The Romans in Britain chronicles invasion, destruction and imposition. The invasions are by the Romans and, later, the Saxons, of an indigenous Celtic culture. Native culture is destroyed, and alien laws are imposed. An envoy from the Belgaic tribe, the Catuvellaunians, tries and fails to describe the impact of the invasion: