The Romans in Britain

Methuen Drama Modern Classics

The Methuen Drama Modern Plays series has always been at the forefront of modern playwriting and has reflected the most exciting developments in modern drama since 1959. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Methuen Drama, the series was relaunched in 2009 as Methuen Drama Modern Classics, and continues to offer readers a choice selection of the best modern plays.

The Romans in Britain

‘Conjuring up an era that is culturally, as well as historically, remote is a notoriously difficult task, but Mr Brenton achieves it with great skill and effect … Of all the possible responses to the evening ahead that, before it began, I thought I might feel, the only one that never so much flickered across my mind was the one that I actually experienced: The Romans in Britain is a very good play indeed.’

Bernard Levin, The Times

This edition includes a foreword by Samuel West and an introduction by Philip Roberts.

Howard Brenton is a British dramatist, noted for his controversial political plays of the 1970s and 1980s. He became resident dramatist at the Royal Court in 1972, following on from David Hare. His plays include Revenge, Brassneck (a collaboration with David Hare), The Churchill Play, Epsom Downs, The Romans in Britain, Pravda (a collaboration with Hare), Berlin Bertie, Paul, Never So Good, and In Extremis. He also wrote 14 episodes for the TV programme Spooks and has translated many plays into English. In 2011 he won a Theatregoers’ Choice Award for Best Play for his Anne Boleyn.

Howard Brenton

The Romans in Britain

Foreword by Samuel West
Introduction by Philip Roberts

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Foreword

Samuel West

‘Where the fuck are we?’

As first lines go, it’s one of the best.

When I became Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres, the first play I directed was The Romans in Britain. I wanted to do it for lots of reasons, one of which was that first line. It’s the job of any artistic director to sniff the air and scent what stories need to be told, and asking where the fuck we were seemed the right thing to do at the very beginning of an artistic tenure.

Here’s where we were: it was 2006. We were five years into the war in Afghanistan and three years past the second invasion of Iraq. Images of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib had become world famous. We were still awaiting the publication of the Bloody Sunday inquiry into the shooting by the British army of civil rights protestors and bystanders in Northern Ireland (it eventually appeared in 2010). Being friends with the most powerful empire in the world seemed like good sense, as it does to the Mother in part one of Romans. It wasn’t a time for good taste or safe choices.

The Romans in Britain is huge, messy and beautiful – a play with a smell about it: the smell of the earth. That same earth which

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.

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.

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:

There is a Roman Army and it is coming.

It is an army of red leather and brass.

It is a ship.

It is a whole thing. It is a monster. It has machines.

It is Roman…

Understand. The Romans are different. They are – (He gestures, trying to find the word. He fails. He tries again.) A nation. Nation. What? A great family. No. A people? No. They are one, huge thing.

His inability to find a way of identifying the implacable might of the Roman army, its facelessness, and its inevitability, creates a powerful image and anticipation. The action of the play involves three historical periods: 54BC, AD515, and 1980. Part One of the play centres on the second expedition of Julius Caesar to Britain. The action covers one day during Caesar’s campaign, and deals with a small grouping of Celts ruled over by a woman – the ‘Mother’. The issue is one, not of some petty and unimportant tribe, which is how Caesar sees it, but a matter of the rights of an ancient people, one established with both a hierarchy, a culture, and a religion. Brenton is intent on describing Celtic procedures, rather than condoning them. For in the world of the play, and of historical reality, the Celts are threatened by invaders. Not just the Romans, but also Belgaic tribes such as the Catuvellaunians and the Trinovantes, groups that are thought to have reached south-east Britain around 75BC. In Part Two, the threat is from the Saxons.

The play establishes the normality of the Celts in their own setting. Its laws are clear and rigorous. Thus the two renegade Irishmen, Conlag and Daui, who open the play are guilty of murder, and have been cursed by the priests. They are also invaders. It is therefore both moral and correct to destroy the impious. Daui is butchered and his blood tipped on the ground as a blessing. Conlag escapes. The matriarch arrives. She is under pressure from two Catuvellaunian envoys to form an alliance against the Roman army. She publicly rejects the advent of the Romans as a fantasy, but reveals privately that she has already made an alliance with the Trinovantes, who are in turn allied to Rome. She trusts neither of the Belgaic tribes, regarding them as foreign invaders. But as she orders that part of the harvest be hidden, a couple of Roman cohorts, separated from the main army, destroy most of the Mother’s group. It is in Scene Three that the violent invasion of one culture by another is presented with a power which is deliberately shocking. Three teenage Celtic boys come out of the trees upstage. They are naked, and wet from swimming. They lark about. It emerges that one of them, Marban, is in his third of 20 years’ training for the Druid priesthood. Caesar himself in his De Bello Gallico testifies to the supreme position held by the Druids. The priests were arbiters, judges, sentenced the guilty, determined penalties, and gave rewards. They were held in awe by other Celts, for they, in effect, carried and determined Celtic culture. It is this which is shattered, and its world with it, as three Roman soldiers arrive, desperate for a swim. The boys are in the way. The soldiers who destroy the Mother and her people are strays from the main army. So here, the three Romans are separate, but stand for the entire army.