Romans: A Novel – Almeida Theatre
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 fro...