Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel is a tiny bit like a British feminist version of The Lehman Trilogy, if the three Lehman brothers were replaced by the Roman siblings - three seemingly immortal, semi-allegorical, deeply damaged brothers whose brutal childhoods in the Victorian era have disastrous consequences for the next 150 years of humanity.
The first new play in aeons from the author of modern classics Anatomy of a Suicide and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, Birch’s Romans is a bleakly irrelevant epic drama with a touch of Pyncheon-esque humour that centres on Kyle Soller’s Jack – undoubtedly the protagonist – plus his brothers: the sadistic, hugely successful Marlow (Oliver Johnstone) and the gentle, fucked up, possibly a serial killer Edmund (Stuart Thompson). They exist between the Victorian age and the present day without ever seeming to get past middle age.
‘My father wanted only sons – he had to get through three dead daughters to get to us’ intones Jack at the beginning. Wrapped in a huge scarf the Andor star kicks matters off playing Jack as a sweet young boy: a little hooked on the gung ho propaganda of the British Empire, but fundamentally a charming little thing who loves his mum and can’t imagine a world without her. Alas, she dies in childbirth, just as he has a strange encounter with his uncle John, an unsettling, blood-soaked figure returned from an unspecified Victorian war.
Things go downhill: Jack and his brother Marlow are sent away to boarding school where they are treated with appalling sadism that sets Marlow down the path of becoming a monster. Jack returns home to discover his father has hit rock bottom and has his youngest sibling Edmund – whose birth resulted in his wife’s death – dressed in women’s clothes. Edmund explains to Jack declaring that he and their father had mutually decided ‘Edmund’ is in fact now dead.
Podcasts happen
Jack fights in the First World War, goes off to climb a mountain and explore the Arctic; Marlow commits atrocities in the jungle and plunders the resources of the third world, eventually rising to political prominence. Jack marries selfishly and turns to novel writing, penning books that stripmine his life and the lives of the ones closest to him and he becomes a literary sensation and starts a cult. Podcasts happen.
Romans is not a rhetorical diatribe about why men are awful. Instead it’s a surreal survey through the shaping forces on British masculinity over the last 150 years or so, from the psychological horror of the Victorian boarding school system to modern day Andrew Tate-brand meninism. Birch’s darkly hilarious prose is gripping, and Sam Pritchard’s production agreeably taut and minimalist, a showcase for the words and actors, with Merle Hensel’s set often pared down to little more than abstract projections or a revolving geometric stage.
It’s intense, in other words, with Soller at the centre in a charismatic, multifaceted performance that requires him to portray both the one coherent character and several variants. The cult guru of the second half is not necessarily intended to be viewed as literally the same person as the little boy at the beginning – the men’s improbably long lives are never directly addressed in the same way as, say, Virgina Woolf's immortal Orlando. There will be those who dislike the way the timeframe messes with the narrative - it’s easier in some way to view it as a series of connected playlets rather than one story that’s meant to make total literal sense.
Birch weaves a deft path – the characters are proper characters and not just flat ciphers for ideas. You can see it as a parable about toxic masculinity without feeling lectured to.
In many ways the message is simple: messed up men running society messes society up. But it’s the writing that dazzles: surreal, savage and at times startlingly empathetic.
