Three brothers are born to daughterless parents sometime in the eighteenth century. Each is uniquely traumatised by his upbringing: the beatings of boarding school, the horrors of war, the witnessing of his father’s suicide by a gunshot to the roof of the mouth. And yet each must go on with life. Romans: A Novel is a story of three men, spanning 150 years, trying to answer the question of what it means to be a man – in other words, what it means to live.
Alice Birch’s study of masculinity is focused, among other things, on the importance of the written word in deciding who gets to have a voice. Its structure is informed by the development of the novel: we begin with Jack Roman narrating his own life alone onstage, wandering into the fog and meeting his long-lost uncle, presumed dead from the (unspecified) war. It’s an image straight from the pages of the nineteenth century, and the language and delivery are suitably stylised too. The Romans’ father is a writer before he commits suicide, which he describes as the most “honourable” profession. Jack later takes up writing himself, to no great success, until he twists the story of his innocent younger brother’s arrest for triple murder into a novel of his own creation. This becomes his religion: when you sell something with enough confidence, people are likely to buy it, even if it is not yours. You must, above all else, have something to say.
Each of the three men, whose characters shift throughout the play’s different chapters (the actors are perhaps not literally playing the same characters throughout), spend their lives searching for immortality. For Jack, it’s as a writer. When confronted by his daughter, also an author, at the end of the play, he is totally unable to comprehend her different reasons for writing a book – he just cannot relate to her. For Marlow (cf. Heart of Darkness), it’s through violence, colonisation, power. For Edmund, it’s through a lack of acknowledgement that he is actually alive.
The world of Romans is a strange, insular space governed by the most strangling aspects of traditional masculinity. It’s occasionally pierced by women characters, who generally represent the voice of reason but are also inevitably sidelined as soon as they pose any perceived threat. A documentary-maker is drugged and taken hostage as soon as she gets Jack in a vulnerable spot; a writer is made a mother against her will and sent to a sanatorium; a concerned mother brings her son cheese sandwiches when he decides to become a badger for the day, and is spat on for the idea. Badgers eat roadkill, idiot.
There is a sense here that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Birch’s play is critical of the development of the novel as something that has primarily amplified male voices, and as such has given credit to the idea that men’s brains are logical and women’s are not. But however hard they try, the women in Romans are trapped in a medium, and a world, that is not their own. Their voices are never quite as loud as those of the gamemakers.
Form meets direction beautifully in Sam Pritchard’s production. As stories start to interweave and overlap, the stage spins – characters crawl over each other, hang onto one another for support. The lighting is stunning (literally: the final scene of the play is like looking directly at the sun). Panic swells when Jack starts his own cult, and for the entire, creepy indoctrination, you can smell smoke in the auditorium.
Romans does a fantastic job at conveying complex ideas in a completely watchable piece of drama. Intelligent and structurally innovative – a bleak reminder of what it means to live in a man’s world.
Reviewer: Holly Sewell
Reviewed: 17th September 2025
North West End UK Rating: