In her newest play, Romans, a novel, award winning writer Alice Birch has produced a compendious, novelistic exploration of masculinity worthy of its subtitle. From the nineteenth- to the twenty-first century, the play tracks the lives of Jack (Kyle Soller), Marlow (Oliver Johnstone) and Edmund Roman (Stuart Thompson): three impossibly long-lived brothers who take wildly different approaches to their male identities. Birch’s text defies formal and narrative coherence, restlessly plumbing the depths of the male experience across a collage of archetypes (the soldier, the coloniser, the cult leader, the tech mogul), and arriving at more questions than answers. The text is so finely wrought, though, that questions of coherence dissolve behind the sheer beauty of the language.
Over the course of the play, the Roman brothers experience and perpetrate a chilling catalogue of horrors, from boarding school abuses to an unending series of wars, colonial extractivism and calculated destruction of indigenous communities, exploitation of women and vulnerable people, parental death, neglect and echoing loneliness. Making neat use of a revolving central panel to denote movement through time and space, Merle Hensel’s set is compellingly stripped back, allowing the ensemble to create and dissolve stage images fluently as the production hurtles through countless interweaving scenes. Hensel’s evocative period costumes are rapidly assumed and discarded by the three brothers, facilitating their chameleonic shifts in age and persona. The entire ensemble offer commanding performances. As Jack, Kyle Soller inhabits Birch’s text with subtlety, effortlessly embodying a whole life from boyish joy to jaded age.
After the interval, we meet Jack Roman in his new guise as cult leader, plying his followers with psychedelics and convincing them of the existence of an earth-bound comet that will spell the end of the world. Jack is eventually ‘cancelled’ for his behaviour, whilst Marlow has become a billionaire tech executive and Edmund, in a nod to Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, leads a workshop group which teaches men how to live as foxes and badgers. As we approach the present moment and the conclusion of the play, the text breaks down until the plurality of male voices becomes a babble of corporate greed, hollow apologies and guilt. Where the script wilfully deconstructs itself, stage pictures and design elements follow suit. One particular scene transition is extremely extended, and disorder dominates the stage.
Conversations scatter and overlap as Jack and his estranged daughter confront one another in a high-end restaurant, manosphere podcasters interview and idolise Marlow, and Edmund encourages workshop participants to consume worms and garbage. Things fall apart as Jack’s daughter (Agnes O’Casey) smears food onto a chef (Jerry Killick), Marlow sprays champagne at his podcast fans (Olivier Huband and Declan Conlon), and the animal workshop group dig through refuse as the backdrop hangs limply where it has fallen from its frame stage left. This disjointedness offers much food for thought, and there is clear appetite for productions that challenge their own structure and defy traditional narrative arcs: Romans, a novel is sold out for the remainder of its run.
In the play’s final moments, the three brothers congregate in front of a circular lighting feature which exposes the darkened auditorium, implicating the audience in the unravelling of the Roman family. Discussing the sale of their childhood home, Jack’s cries for “something to unite us” are left unacknowledged as the three struggle to find common ground. It is, perhaps, important that Romans, a novel arrives at an ambivalent end. The audience are offered no solutions to the complex question of what masculinity means, nor are we given an optimistic sense of ‘what’s next’. Instead, we are left to consider the cycles of cruelty that besiege the lives of the Roman brothers, an indefatigable cruelty that may change shape as the centuries pass, but always, inevitably, persists.
Drama
Romans, a novel
By Alice Birch
Director: Sam Pritchard
Photo credit: Marc Brenner
Cast includes: Declan Conlon, Yanexi Enriquez, Olivier Huband, Oliver Johnstone, Jerry Killick, Adelle Leonce, Agnes O’Casey, Kyle Soller and Stuart Thompson.
Until 11th October 2025
Running time: 2 hours and 50 minutes (including interval).