Howard Brenton
THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN
Crucible Theatre, Sheffield
Twenty-five years ago, Howard Brenton set out to shock the bourgeoisie with his play, The Romans in Britain, at the National’s Olivier Theatre. It contained everything that the theatre of that age loved to use for this purpose – foul language, male nudity, simulated sex acts on stage, sympathy for the downtrodden Irish – all combined in a timeless and formless disunity. From this point of view, the play was a huge success. “FURY OVER NUDE PLAY SHOCKER”, was the London Evening Standard’s front-page headline; “A disgrace . . . disgusting . . . GLC chief Cutler threatens grant cut over new NT drama”, it continued. Sir Peter Hall, absent in New York, was telephoned, and replied with typical bluster:
“It is in my view an ambitious and remarkable piece of dramatic writing. . . . Caesar’s Roman army was noted for its brutality and sexual licence. This is apparent in one scene in the play. The director and author feel it is a context that could not be side-stepped or ignored. If I thought it was meretricious and encouraging what it is supposed to be deploring then I would not put it on.”
The theatrical establishment was having great fun. Mary Whitehouse took out a private prosecution, setting the scene for a rerun of the Lady Chatterley trial.
There was, however, a fatal weakness in the defence case: critics were almost unanimous against the literary merits of the piece. Milton Shulman’s response was typical: “There is something about envisaging for the stage the dark ages of Britain during the Roman occupation that brings a rush of pretension and gibberish to the head. . . . Conducted on a consistent level of costumed rant and banal verbiage, this account of what Caesar’s men did to the sun-worshipping Celts and Druids is gratuitously vulgar, violent and vacuous”. And, he concluded, “In its desire to give contemporary playwrights the run of the National and to establish its anti-establishment credentials, the National can drop some awful clangers and this is one of its worst”. “REMOVE IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE”, ran the headline.
And so they did. Only the reviewer in the TLS took a more charitable view (October 24, 1980). The truth was that he was so ignorant of modern theatrical convention that it had not occured to him that this was the first time men had been shown gallivanting naked on stage in this manner. After all, women had been required to perform naked since Oh Calcutta! (1969), and simulated rape, whether hetero- or homosexual, must by now be normal in this age of equality. The play was of greater interest to him for its re-presentation of the past, both ancient and modern, as an example of flashback technique.
As the only reviewer to have taken Brenton’s play seriously, I found myself an instant celebrity. I received a congratulatory postcard from the seventy-six-year-old doyen of theatre criticism, Sir Harold Hobson. In the court case that was to ensue, I was booked to appear as an expert witness on buggery in the Roman army – since the artistic argument was weak, the defence of historical truth had to be substituted – and, as former applicant for the post of Latrine Assistant in NATO headquarters at the Palace of Fontainebleau, I was happy to oblige. Alas, Mrs Whitehouse withdrew her prosecution.
Twenty-five years on, Sam West presents the first revival of the play, in Sheffield, the city of The Full Monty. Needless to say, The Romans in Britain no longer shocks; no one walked out, and they even have matinees for old-age pensioners and school parties. The poetry of the action and the brutality of conquest speak clearly to a generation brought up on Iraq and Darfur, and we can easily accept that the victims in Brenton’s play are as casually brutal as their tormentors – for Brenton’s ancient British are as nasty a group of savages as their modern Irish equivalents, or the Roman or the British armies. Murder, theft and torture are what bind them together in their common humanity. At the Crucible, the staging and the acting are superb, the nude scenes almost beautiful in their relaxed elegance. Once the shock of nudity falls away, the relationship created between Britain under the Roman conquest and the Saxon invasion on the one hand, and Northern Ireland on the other, emerges far more clearly.
For this reason, the role of Captain Chichester, played superbly by Guy Williams, now appears central, despite the disappearance of its historical context. Chichester is an undercover British officer working as a labourer on a border farm in northern Ireland, who masquerades as an IRA sympathizer offering Czech arms to the movement in order to set up the killing of its local leader, O’Rourke. It is Chichester’s drunken dreams, as he waits for O’Rourke in a cornfield, of former atrocities in his Kentish homeland that make the link between the ancient British past and the modern situation in Ireland. “As I see it, you’re either a madman or an Intelligence Officer with the Special Air Services Regiment”, says O’Rourke when he finally arrives. And when Chichester admits to his true identity, and tries to expound his muddled ideas, O’Rourke concludes, “I think he may just be an honourable man, having a hard time of it. The assassin, humanised by his trade”. For a moment, before Chichester is shot, there is a glimmer of sympathy between the two men, both professional murderers.
This was once one of the most disturbing scenes in the play, since the audience at the time understood well the reference to Captain Robert Nairac, who disappeared in 1977 in mysterious circumstances in south Armagh. For some, he was a hero, who could be described as an “enthusiastic and intelligent officer with an overly romantic view of combating terrorism. He enjoyed the idea of mingling with the locals playing the role of a dashing undercover warrior”. For others, he was the symbol of a dirty war that the British army was fighting in the 1970s and 80s, and whose secrets have frustrated every subsequent attempt at official inquiries. If Nairac were not now forgotten, this scene would pack an even more powerful message for modern audiences.
A little more of the story is now known. Nairac is indeed both an official hero, posthumously awarded the George Cross in 1979, and also one whose death embarrasses both sides equally. It seems that he was a Grenadier Guards officer unofficially seconded to the SAS, and inexplicably given to singing republican songs in pubs; he was dragged out from a pub one night and never seen again. It is widely believed that he was tortured so severely that his body had to be hidden from discovery by processing it in a cattlefeed mill; for many years, meat pies were known in Derry as Nairacs. But he also stands accused of raids over the border, and of being directly or indirectly involved with the Ulster Volunteer Force in at least three famous unsolved murder cases.
Howard Brenton’s version of the Nairac episode is far less disturbing than the facts as they now appear, but it raises the same question it did twenty-five years ago: how could a British officer be so lacking in common morality as to involve himself in this ghastly mess, and be so stupid as to believe that he could pass himself off as an IRA sympathizer? Brenton’s attempt to get inside the muddled dreams of a hero-murderer is perhaps closer to the truth than he knew at the time, or, given the interest of both sides in keeping silent, than we shall ever know.
So the drama of The Romans in Britain is enhanced for those of us who know our recent history, and Sam West’s production certainly improves on the original NT production of Michael Bogdanov by its attention to the meaning of the play, rather than its potential to shock. The twenty-one actors (and two dogs), who between them play over fifty parts, work superbly together as a team, and bring out as much of the humour, brutality and poetry of action as it is possible to do in a play which emerges as hugely ambitious, calling as it does on Brecht, Lear and the Arthur legend. But even in this sympathetic rendering, which is perhaps the best we are likely to see, The Romans in Britain still lacks the essential ingredient to achieve classic status. In my original review, I compared Brenton’s attempt to use the British past in order to comment on the present with that of David Jones’s In Parenthesis (published in 1937, and first broadcast in 1948, with Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas in the cast), in which the First World War figures as an enduring archetype of war and suffering, and my comparison holds. Jones succeeded because of his ability to create resonances with the language that he used; Brenton’s language is banal and consistently middle-class. In the stage directions, he asks his actors to speak in Welsh or Belfast- or Dublin-Irish accents, in “Bertie Wooster”, in Latin, or in Anglo-Saxon, but the words he gives them to say are always ordinary middle-class vernacular speech. Obscenities stick out as alien, because he has no ear for their placing in the rhythm of a sentence. His soldiers do not sound like soldiers any more than his peasants sound like peasants. The whole complexity of British-Irish history has been reduced to a grey conformity of language, where soldiers say things like “I am always building lavatories on this campaign that are never used”. David Jones could hit a better note: “I was with Abel when his brothers found him, under the green tree. I built a shit-house for Artaxerxes”. Brenton completely misses the poetry of ordinary speech, and so his figures lose all individuality, and The Romans in Britain cannot be saved even by a cast as talented as that at the Crucible Theatre.
