Romans at the Almeida review and star rating: ★★
Writer Alice Birch’s new play, Romans: A Novel, at the Almeida Theatre, examines the disparate, disconnected, distended lives of three brothers, over more than a century. Against this backdrop, Birch – famous for her work on blockbuster television series like Succession and Normal People – explores the corrosive performance of masculinity.
The play follows the Roman brothers through the decades: the eldest, Jack (Kyle Soller), a soldier, explorer, author, and guru who becomes a “victim” of cancel culture; the middle brother, Marlow (Oliver Johnstone), a ruthless imperialist who amasses a fortune and eventually becomes a billionaire tech bro; and the youngest, Edmund (Stuart Thompson), an aimless drifter who drops out of society completely, before he re-emerges as a minor influencer with a whiff of the Liver King.
Much of the attention is lavished on Jack, while Marlow’s scenes feel like interruptions designed mostly to remind the audience of his awfulness. Edmund’s most interesting storyline – involving a string of murders – is barely explored. It functions more as a launchpad for the next phase in Jack’s life than as a way to develop the only sympathetic sibling, an otherworldly figure who often feels like an afterthought.
Beginning at the tail-end of the long 19th century, and extending to the modern day, the play shifts to reflect the conventions of the dominant literary trends of each period. This overlay is interesting in theory, but the end result is frustrating. With a run-time of more than two and a half hours, the play is over-long, and abrupt changes in tone and style make it difficult to engage with the story.
It is most entertaining when it is at its most conventional; during a protracted mid-century interlude in which Jack has become the leader of an artsy commune with drugs and orgies. This is also where we see the most fully developed female character, Esther (Adelle Leonce), a documentarian who has come to interview Jack, but who finds herself the subject of an interrogation by his followers.
In this scene, a conversation about literary critics, between Jack and Esther, feels like a preemptive meta-defence against criticism of the play – a more prosaic version of the ‘It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant’ exchange from Glass Onion – and like that film, Romans will divide opinion. Some will regard it as a brilliant exploration of masculinity through the lens of a postmodern, theatrical reinterpretation of the roman-fleuve, while others will see it as a disjointed mess, which doesn’t really work conceptually or as entertainment. The truth likely lies somewhere in between.
Some of the performances are excellent, and with many of the actors taking on multiple roles, there are opportunities for some to exhibit considerable range. Jerry Killick is noteworthy, providing one of the most chilling villains ever brought to the stage. But the staging itself veers unevenly between too static and too frenetic, and too much of the dialogue (especially before the interval) is describing what is happening, rather than demonstrating it. The overarching conceit of unnaturally long-lived characters is redolent of Orlando or even Highlander, but it is never addressed in the text, and presenting it without acknowledgement clearly confused some in the audience.
Unavoidably, given the subject matter, Romans is bleak. While there are flashes of humour, and fleeting instances of empathy, there is a pervasive sense of anomie, and it offers no hope for improvement. Rossini made a couple of observations about the work of Wagner, which Romans brings to mind; it has “lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour”, and “one can’t judge it after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time”.
Romans plays at the Almeida until 11 October
Read more: Otherland at the Almeida review: Saccharine and melodramatic
Read more: Uncle Vanya at the Almeida is brilliantly acted, cleverly staged and gratifyingly reinterpreted