Review: Romans, a novel (Almeida Theatre)

Review by Sam Waite

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In recent years, whether as a gotcha or as a genuine contemplation, many have asked, “What is a woman?” In Romans, a novel, Alice Birch is more concerned with what it is that shapes a man, or at least the idea of one. Exactly the kind of ambitious piece you might expect from the Almeida Theatre, Birch’s welcome return to playwriting is a near-three-hour epic spanning decades of time, social movements, and ideas around patriarchy and masculinity as constructs.

Romans begins at the home of its titular family, where eldest son Jack meets his paternal uncle the same day that his mother will later die in childbirth. His chief symbols of masculinity a depressed alcoholic (his father) and a war-torn recluse (the presumed-dead uncle), Jack spends the remainder of his youth at a strict boarding school, where younger brother Marlow soon joins him. The cruelties of their headmaster mould the brothers in different ways, and while Jack is let with a lust for new adventures, and Marlow develops a taste for sadism and a merciless ambition, youngest child Edmund faces his own turmoil left alone with their father.

Written in five parts, Birch’s script is as bulky as you may expect, the published version coming just shy of 180 pages. Its subtitle, a novel, dictates the structure of parts one and two (presented on stage as the first act) in which exposition comes chiefly from extended monologuing on the part of the eldest Roman brother. Unless you’re less observant, or perhaps less presumptuous, it won’t have escaped your attention that these are men and masculinity as written by a woman, and doubtless some will be dubious as to Birch’s place as a commentator on masculinity’s many guises. Thankfully, any doubts cast over her aptitude are severely misguided, and her work makes astute, often subtle comments on both masculinity and the concept of fatherhood.

It makes sense that Jack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, is drawn the most clearly, is crafted the most fully on paper. Edmund and particularly Marlow are broader, more defined by what we don’t know for certain than what we do. Stuart Thompson, carrying himself with much of the same nervous energy he brought to Spring Awakening at the same theatre, excels in his performance as Edmund, a young man who was never given the option or opportunity to fully form his own humanity, much less a true identity. When told he needs to make something of himself, his Edmund is heartbreaking in responding, “I do not know that I have the pieces.” Tasked with the less traditional versions of manhood, and with the most openly traumatic moments of the decades-spanning narrative, Thompson gives a rich, sensitive portrayal of a person not broken, but never given the chance at wholeness.

Middle-child (disregarding, as their father does, four dead sisters) Marlow is more vaguely drawn largely because it is through Jack’s eyes that we see much of the world. A horrific, brutal incident with their school headmaster left the younger Roman brother cruel, ruthless in his efforts to be in a permanent position of power. While during the first act the role doesn’t allow for as much nuance or exploration, there is much to be said for the coldness that Oliver Johnstone brings to the part. As Marlow progresses through warfare, and war-crime, before returning home to build his empire, we see in real time as he rewrites history in spite of the voices trying and failing to correct him. There’s a moment of hesitation on Johnstone’s monologue on the horrors his enemies were subjected to, where he lets us see the rapid thought process behind telling himself, telling everyone, that these are horrors these people feel were inflicted on them.

Weighty as the show is, there is some levity in these brothers’ lives, and some dark humour thrown in alongside it. In act two, long-established billionaire Marlow makes a guest appearance on a laddish, vividly toxic podcast, with all the trappings you’d expect surrounding him as he proclaims not only that his wife leaves his extramarital relationships alone, but that she quite simply has no right to complaint. It’s harrowing, sickening even, but the podcast sequence is so familiar, so open to our mocking, that it’s hard not to find yourself laughing. Indeed, much of the humour comes at the expense of a person feeling they’ve embarrassed themselves, or at someone being outright mocked. Dining with her father at an experimental restaurant, Jack’s daughter Miranda takes great joy in discussing roadkill and viscera while he sits across from her nauseous. “I’m talking about faecal matter,” the hunter-cum-chef announces, met with Miranda’s boisterous, venomously sweet, “I was wondering when someone would!”

Agnes O’Casey’s Miranda is one of several indelible characters who populate the disparate scenes of Romans, and particularly its second act. Alice Birch shows a real knack for creating these supporting characters, who are all distinct enough that the six multi-rolling actors are given ample opportunity to shine. Where Adelle Leonce does well with a juicy role in documentarian Esther, Yanexi Enriquez is delightfully cutting as cult member (a lot has happened by this point in the Romans’ lives) Anna, having also shined towards the end of act one as Marlow’s foreign-born, practically-kidnapped wife. Oliver Huband is particularly funny as one of the podcast pros, while Declan Conlon is stirring as both the brothers’ father and their mysterious uncle. Jerry Killick rounds out the cast beautifully, especially when asked to move both through and between scenes in act two to great effect.

Then of course, there’s Jack himself, Kyle Soller. Soller, O’Casey and Enriquez are the primary mouthpieces for the several wordy, topically vast monologues Birch has provided. Perhaps the most impressive thing about all three performances is that, to my recollection, the full pages of dialogue in the published text are exactly what I heard spoken on stage. Jack Roman exists in the grey area between Marlow’s calculated coldness and Edmund’s desperate want to find true connection, and Soller brings an increasing detachment to the first act, as well as a deliberate falseness to the second. By the time he shares a painful truth with Miranda, we don’t question whether or not she will give him the response he wants, or maybe even needs, but whether there’s any truth left in a man who spent so long writing his own story.

This is not to say that Romans is a faultless work. As is often the case when tackling such pervasive ideas, Alice Birch’s script does occasionally overstate its themes in a way that isn’t itself ineffective, but proves unnecessary when such a clarity of purpose is found later in those same scenes. Merle Hensel’s has managed to create vibrant images with a simple staging, though it’s hard to say whether Hensel or director Sam Pritchard should be held accountable for an overlong transition between parts three and four of the script. Harry Style’s “Sign of The Times” isn’t without relevance to the proceedings, but in the moment proves more distracting than it does enlightening.

Pritchard, an accomplished director as well as Birch’s husband, proves a strong candidate for his role here. There is a sense of motion to Birch’s play which Pritchard brings to life with constant motion from his cast, matching that of the rotating platform central to Hensel’s stage, and his understanding of the characters and their motives is essential to the overlapping, intertwining latter scenes. Hensel, meanwhile, provides some clever wardrobe touches which serve to deepen the surrounding work. In the play’s third part, Esther is the only woman – the only person, actually – not subservient to Jack. In control of her own work and decisions, and blatantly opposed to some of the less progressive ideas within “the community,” she is also the only woman wearing trousers. Earlier on, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the boarding school pyjamas and prison uniforms, and Uncle John’s bloodied introductory uniform tells us before any words can be said what kind of life he has life.

Dense, wordy and sweeping in its scope, Romans, a novel at first seems as though it may be better suited to that titular medium. It’s when the women enter the fray, when the wives of the elder brothers disrupt their own carefully-crafter narratives to openly announce, “This isn’t how it happened,” that the need for a live, visual component becomes all too clear. Alice Birch has set out to ask questions on what being a man means, how it looks, what aspects of masculinity are to be preserved, what of our fathers we must emulate, and what of our mothers we must cast aside. In the process, she has raised questions about what humanity itself is – particularly, she asks these with the character of Edmund, the brother too scared and too fractured to present the “man” which seems demanded of him, but the only one brave enough to ask what part of the façade and imitation it is that makes a man.

Rich, challenging, and providing routes both long-standing and freshly-discovered into questioning and understanding what masculinity means, what it even is, Romans, a novel asks as much from its audience as it gives them, and refuses to provide easy answers or comforting platitudes. This is theatre at its most confrontational, its least willing to have its edges sanded down. Yes, the length may be daunting, as may the wordiness of the text, but the rewards are ripe for the picking, and despite spanning decades, covering themes both abstract and painfully clear, and even with the one awkward transition, this show never starts to feel its length.

Romans, a novel plays at the Almeida Theatre until October 11th

For tickets and information visit https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/romans/

Photos by Marc Brenner