Theatre review: Romans, a Novel

I have to say that after some of Alice Birch's previous work, Romans, a Novel was a show I considered skipping; Kyle Soller's return to the stage was the reason I gave it a go, and the weird but thought-provoking epic proves to be worth the gamble. Soller plays Jack Roman, eldest of the three titular brothers, who we first meet as a ten-year-old on what turns out to be the night his mother will die, giving birth to his youngest brother. But first he will meet a blood-soaked soldier, apparently an uncle long since thought lost, who will instil in him a desire to live a certain kind of man's life, full of adventure and exploration. The subtitle "a Novel" is an unusual one to see attached to an original play but Birch's story and Sam Pritchard's production justify it in a sweeping family saga that feels very much like it's immersing the audience into a detailed, intricate story.

From this dreamlike opening we go to a brutal Dickensian boarding school where the abusive teacher (Jerry Killick) only strengthens Jack's desire to escape.

But for his brother Marlow (Oliver Johnstone) the effect is arguably the one the public school system was always intended to create: He develops the kind of sociopathic detachment that allows him to go around the world committing genocide in the name of Empire and his own personal fortune. So as the novel moves on into a boy's own story with Jack exploring the world and climbing mountains, Marlow provides a much darker parallel.

I said to Jan at the interval that I thought the play was being (deliberately) foggy around the edges about when exactly this is taking place, and in the second act this becomes more explicit: Like Cloud Nine with less abrupt transitions, the brothers' normal lifespans are stretched over the last 150 years, each showing how a particular masculine archetype fits into those periods: The most aggressively masculine, Marlow goes from Edwardian colonialist to toxic tech bro in the present day, spouting his own superiority on podcasts where other men worship him.

Edmund (Stuart Thompson) is the youngest and most effeminate, which in the early scenes manifests itself in his father (Declan Conlon) dressing him up in his dead wife's clothes as a kind of replacement. By the early twentieth century Edmund is accused of murdering several men, the implication being that they had hooked up first (nothing is ever proved.) Eventually he's found it so hard to fit into a place in the world that he tries to live outside of it, never settling down and running workshops on how to live as animals foraging for food.

Jack sits somewhere in between, never quite as malicious as Marlow but not as unwilling as Edmund to enjoy the advantages of being male and born into a certain amount of privilege. Prone to buy into his own hype and abuse his standing, after becoming a popular author we see him in the 1960s as a charismatic commune leader, and by the present day he's been cancelled for the revelations of what he got up to there.

It's never afraid to take its time but Romans rarely drags; the highlight is probably the boy's own sequence which Pritchard puts on Merle Hensel's ever-revolving platform, constant movement but hypnotic rather than frantic. It does mean the more static second act suffers a bit in comparison, but it also means Pritchard succeeds in showing Birch's variety of settings and tones. It's also structurally interesting in the way it uses its actors, drip-feeding us the ensemble so each actor has played multiple roles before the next is introduced to the stage. It's hard to miss that this also gives us all the male cast first, surrounding the brothers with entirely male influences before they encounter any of the women who will be affected by who they've become: Like Agnes O'Casey as first Jack's neglected wife, then his neglected daughter. Adelle Leonce doesn't even appear until after the interval, as a documentarian trying to understand Jack's guru phase.

Wearing its high concepts lightly, Romans, a Novel has a gentle way of dealing with some harsh themes, equally critical of and sympathetic to the three men at its centre whose lives are moulded by expectation. There's great, distinct performances from Soller, Johnstone and Thompson as the trio reacting very differently to the demands of modern masculinity, and as ever one of the best compliments I can offer is that it doesn't feel anything like as long as its hefty running time actually is.

Romans, a Novel by Alice Birch is booking until the 11th of October at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.