howard brenton's romans

PHILIP ROBERTS 5

Howard Brenton’s Romans I

Over the last sixteen years, Howard Brenton has written some forty pieces for theatre, television, radio and film. Of these, eleven are full-length plays, four are adaptationsor translations, six were written in collaboration, five for television, one a film script and one a play for radio. The remainder are shor- ter works, mainly of an occasional nature. By any standards, it is a prolific output. Most of it has attracted controversy of some sort. John Russell Taylor in 1971 guardedly pronounced that Brenton was ’a hit-or-miss dramatist who hits often enough to be worth watching.’ Michael Billington, striking a tone which he has steadily maintained to date, denounced Brenton’s Fruit (1971) as ‘a wild, flailing unfocussed attack on the corrupting effect of power’, and worried about the play’s simple-mindedness.2 Brenton’s modern version of Measure for Measure at the Northcott, Exeter (1972) saw the theatre board call in a lawyer to advise on the identification of Macmillan with the Duke and Enoch Powell as Angelo. Told that an action for libel was possible, the identifications were removed. Brenton angrily noted that ‘It was the first time I had ever worked inside a big theatre in England. I got an inch inside the door and they had me by the ball^'.^ JonathanHammond, in a thoughtful review of Magnificence (1 973), nevertheless attacked the play’s ’lack of political maturity. . . Brenton’s own political beliefs and attitudes are little more than in~hoate’.~ Despite generally hostile or equivocal critical response, Brenton was commissioned to write the first new play for the National Theatre. Weapons of Happiness opened in 1976 and Brenton prefig- ured the events of four years later on:

. . . someone’s got to go in first and start doing something. The question is, will new writing actually work on a big stage at theNational? . . . if the National is to be in any sense national, then it’s got to be about England today and that means new writing. You can go on forever as a playwright earning your living in cultural cul-de-sacs playing to 30 people a night I now want to be tested on a big scale.5

The courage of Brenton’s decision did not inhibit those critics who had already categorised Brenton and were consequently impervious to any advance in his writing. A few were sensitive. Albert Hunt recognised that ’Brentonphces contemporary political violence into a historical context and, in doing so, distances the violence, makes it possible to pass judgments’.6 Prescriptive responses, however, continued to flourish. Reviewing a pro- duction of The Churchill PIay (originally seen at Nottingham in 1974) at Strat- ford in 1978, Billington disputed Brenton’s vision of the future: ’after four

6 Critical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3

years of sunny Jim and growing financial stability. Brenton’s notion Of a COl- lapsing England now looks slightly alarmist’.’ In June 1980, A Short ShaT Shock by Brenton and Tony Howard opened at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, amidst calls by some Tory MP.s for the Arts Council to deprive the theatre of its grant. James Fenton‘s rarefied sensibilities found it ’juvenile, ignorant, unfunny, embarrassing and worthless’ and he left at the interval.*

Yet if Brenton had become to some extent resigned to a chorus of disap- proval about his work, the response to The Romans in Britain, which opened at theNationa1 Theatre on 15 October 1980, was generally pitched at a level of abuse and vilification equalled in recent times only by the response to Edward Bond‘s Saved in 1965. More or less overnight, the dramatist became the target of hysterical attack, which continued throughout the play’s run in repertoire until the spring of 1981. As with Saved in 1965, part of one scene (the attempted buggery of aCelt by a Roman soldier) was singled out and the play implied to be only about that scene. Saved became notorious for its baby-stoning scene, The Romans for Part One, Scene Three (the moment itself occupies two of thirteen printed pages).g The critical response to the play was essentially of two kinds. The first had to do with the play’s ideas; the second with how it was presented. Billington, nothing if not consistent, found ‘a vast disproportion between the extravagance of the form and the banality of the thesis’.”J A Sunday Telegraph leader decided that the play ‘is judged artistically worthless by the critics and morally offensive by the audience’. l1 Francis King in the same issue opined that ’Much of it is of dubious argument as history and of even more dubious merit as drama’. The leader of theGLC, Sir HoraceCutler, walked out of a performance and the chairman of theGLC‘s arts committee, one Freddie Weyer, called it ’the most disgust- ing display I have seen and I have heard. I find it difficult to repeat some of the dialogue in the,play to close friends. I’m not narrow minded, please don’t think so, I’m very broad minded’. Finally, in this catalogue of meas- ured response, came a letter from Milton Shulman to the Guardian, which claimed that ’Brenton’s play comes far closer to the sado-masochistic, por- nographic literature of Soh0 than anything found in any English or Greek classic’.13 As I write, the GLC has effectively cut its grant to the National Theatre by about fifteen per cent, and the play’s director, Michael Bogdanov, is the subject of a private prosecution by Mary Whitehouse (who has not seen the play) under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act. Bogdanov is accused of having ’procured the commission by a man of an act of gross indecency with another man’. Of the reviews I have seen, only four seemed able to give a careful (not necessarily approving) account of the play’s processes. l4 In addition, the Sunday Times ’Critics’ Guide’ section continued, week after week, to dissuade its readers from going to see the play, an action more

Howard Brenton’s Romans 7

spiteful than informative. The box-office figures for the play’s run were very high.

I1

The first critical response, as outlined above, resists the setting and analysis of the play, its central thesis. The action takes place in three historical periods, 54 BC, AD 515, and 1980. The first part of this article examines the context and the sources of Brenton’s historical material and the use made of these sources in the writing of the play. Such an examination shows that Brenton‘s account of part of the early history of Britain is verified by the standard works on the period and that his selection of detail for dramatic purposes neither distorts history nor manufactures it. Part One of the play centres on the second expedition of Julius Caesar to

Britain. The action covers one day duringcaesar‘s campaign and deals with a group of Celts, ruled over by a woman. Caesar had landed near Sandwich in the middle of 54 BC, with an army of five legions, two thousand cavalry, escorted by twenty-eight warships and with nearly six hundred transport ships. He began to march inland after midnight through the territory of the Trinovantes, a Belgaic tribe settled in what is now Essex The Trinovantes were in alliance with Rome, largely in order to protect themselves from the neighbouring (and more powerful) Belgaic tribe of the Catuvellaunians, who occupied modem Hertfordshire, and whose main stronghold was probably at Wheathampstead. Caesar, beating off guerrillas on the way, stormed the great fort of Cassivellaunus, who was forced to sue for peace and undertook not to molest the neighbouring Trinovantes. In the latter part of September, Caesar returned to GauLIS The conquest of Britain was not accomplished until the invasion by Claudius in AD 43. Brenton thus identifies three groups at the beginning of his play, Celtic, Belgaic and Roman.

The Celtic group in the play lives to the north of the Catuvellaunians (p. 31), but other references in the play make it clear that Brenton is not concen- trating merely upon a small group north of St Albans. Caesar (p. 53) refers to the Celts of Northern Italy and what is called into the play is the fact that by the fourth century BC the Celts in numbers and in territory were the greatest people in Europe. Their period of decline began when theGauls of Northern Italy were conquered by the Romans and when the tribes north of the Alps were subjugated or expelled by the Germans.16 The point is to do with the ancient and established rights of the peoples of whom the Mother’s group is representative and not to do with the depiction of some petty and unimpor- tant tribe. That is how Caesar judges them. Asinus, Caesar‘s official biog- rapher in Part One, Scene Five, refers to them as ‘of the ancient stock of Bri-


tain’ (p 52). In focusing upon such a small community, Brenton implies the advance of Roman imperialism throughout the then known world. He is, above all (see below) intent on stressing the integrity of the community, its viability and procedures.

By contrast, the Belgaic groups of Catuvellaunians and Trinovantes were invaders of Britain almost at the same time as the Romans, and equally dis- trusted. The Belgae, of mixed Celto-Teutonic ancestry, are thought to have reached south-east Britain around 75 BC. They came from the area to the south of the Ardennes and their rapid expansion through south-east Britain to coastal Essex, Hertfordshire and, a little later, into the Cambridge region, caused further movement and unrest among the neighbouring non-Belgaic peoples.” Thus the Celtic group of Part One is both threatened by the advance of the Belgaic tribes and, as the play opens, beginning to be threatened by the landing of the Roman army. Yet this group stands for the peoples of the greater part of Britain which, even with the advent of the Romans, was still Celtic-speaking.

Notwithstanding the view of one critic that ‘The first half carefully creates a world of casual violence and institutionalized brutality, which is artistically interesting, if a travesty of the actual social organization of southern Britain before the R0rnans’,~9 Brenton’s use of history both political and social tallies not only with what is known of the period but also demonstrates an extraordinary skill in vivifying Celtic political and social realities. In Scene Two, the Mother is under pressure from two envoys from Cassivellaunus to make an alliance and send her wamors to repulse the Romans as they land on the coast. She controls some fifty farms in the area and the resentment at the power of Cassivellaunus spills out from the villagers over a cattle raid some five years ago. The Mother apparently rejects the Roman army as an inven- tion and only subsequently in the scene does she reveal to her husband that there is an army and that she has been visited by envoys from the Trinovantes. The Trinovantes have made an alliance with the Romans and, since the Mother‘s group fosters children with them, her group is now in alliance with Rome as well. She also knows that Cassivellaunus has taken his families into the great fort at Wheathampstead, and that the danger to her people is now acute. Politically, she will ally herself through fostering with the smaller of the two Belgaic tribes of the south-east, though her opinion of both of the tribes is that they are invaders and foreigners, recently arrived On the day she takes the precaution of intending to hide part of the harvest, a couple of Roman cohorts, presumably from the attack on Wheathamp- stead, become separated from the main body of the army, and destroy most of the Mother‘s group. Her attempts to secure her people come to nothing by accident. Caesar makes the best of the mess, but he is more enraged at the

Howard Brenton's Romans 9

loss of controlby his commander of the legion, the legionary legate, than by the wanton destruction of the natives (Scene Five). Caesar converts a mas- sacre into policy. The animals are taken, the fields salted and the prisoners killed. If civil war then ensues, it will be to the Romans'advantage. It is a chapter of accidents. The Roman soldiers who kill Brac and Viridio and cap- ture Marban (the mother's foster sons) have similarly become disengaged from their unit and act like off-duty squaddies (Scene Three). Not only does all this detail show clearly the perennial consequence of any war in its mixture of formal destruction and incidental murder, but it also establishes a feeling of the historical veracity of the group of Celts which is decimated.

In his attempt to create the sense of a community with its ownmores, Bren- ton skilfully utilises the fact that much of what is known about early Celtic organisation, secular institutions, religious customs and art, derives from an area which was relatively untouched by Roman culture until nearly half a millenium later than wasGaul. As Dillon and Chadwick put it: '. . . the oral literature of ancient Ireland, including the mythological traditions, survived . . . till a much later period. The archaism of Irish culture . . . preserved its oral traditions intact. . . till the art and fashion of writing had become general in the Christian monastic scriptoria, from the sixth century AD onwards. . . Celtic Britain forms a bridge between the two Celtic realms of Gaul and Ireland.'Zo In this manner, what is said of the Motheis Celtic group in Part One of the play begins the process of identifylng their fate with that of Ireland far into the future. It is in early Irish records that the institution of 'clientship' is explained (p. 24). The ordinary freeman was normally bound by clientship to a nobleman who, in return for a fixed render of provisions and a certain amount of unpaid labour, gave the freeman stock to graze his land and guaranteed him a limited protection against the violence of powerful neighbours. This ancient Celtic custom was the basis of the nobleman's prosperity and of his social standing. The practice of fostering children is similarly recorded as 'a normal feature of Irish society. . . Sometimes children were fostered for love, but usually a fosterage-fee was paid', which var- ied according to social rank. The time of fosterage ended for boys at seventeen (which means that Brac, Viridio and Marban, all fostered by the Mother, are younger than seventeen) and the girls at fourteen, at which time they returned home, The tie of fosterage remained close: 'there was an obligation on the part of the children to support their foster-parents in old age, and those who had been fostered together were bound in close companion- ship'.21 The same authorities note that the high prestige of women 'is a feature characteristic of early Celtic civilization and especially of Celtic mythol- ogy' and that among the ancient Picts 'matrilinear succession was the rule till the ninth century'.22 Brenton uses these details to establish the normality of


the community before disaster overtakes it, even to the tiny detail of the game played by Brac, Viridio and Marban in Scene Two, In Ireland, the game was played with a ball and was called hin phuill, ’driving a hole’.23

The religion of the community is established via Marban who is in his third year of training for the priesthood. Caesar himself, in De ,Bell0 Gallico, testified to the supreme position held by the Druids among the Celtic tribes. The priests decided in almost all disputes, public and private; they judged crimes of all degree, set boundaries, determined penalties and gave rewards. Dissenters from their judgement were banned from sacrifice. ,The banned were deemed to be impious and doomed,“ and’They believe that the execu- tion of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods’.25 Thus the reaction of the foster brothers to the Irishmen, Conlag and Daui, who confess to murder and to having been cursed by the priests (Scene Two) is a perfectly moral one and they are obliged by their laws both to kill the criminals and to make a blessing by tipping Daui’s blood on the ground. Brenton is not intent upon endorsing such savagery. He is, though, concerned to show how the stric- tures of law and proper behaviour, as determined by agreement, were observed by the members of such a society. Druids were held in awe by other Celts. Even Marban‘s brothers are wary of him, as is seen in the uneasy jok- ing about his training in Scene Three. For a while in the same scene, Marban plays sardonically upon their susceptibilities, raises a ghost, which Brac says he can see, and then begins to emerge as one of the pivotal figures in the play as he questions his brothers’ superstition: ’A ghost a trick, a trick a ghost. If the religious shit themselves, what‘s the difference? (p. 36). It is in this context that the three stray Romans arrive. Marban, as before, is the natural leader of the three brothers. The attempted rape of Marban is thus the defilement of a priest and not simply an obscene assault. Though the Roman does not know it, he commits a symbolic as well as a real action, not essentially different from Caesar’s systematic razing of Celtic temples and his desecration of Celtic priests (p. 57). It was, after all, Caesar who, on being criticised for allowing his troops to rape, remarked, ’My men fight just as well when they stink of perfume’.% If the brothers are ‘wogs’ to the Romans (p. 37) they then have to deal with the fact that Marban curses them in Latin. His youthfulness is nowhere more tellingly shown as when he threatens to curse the soldier - ‘Exsecrationem scio’ (p. 45). Caesar‘s insistence that ’The oldGods are dead’ (p. 57) is turned as a savage irony by the desecrated priest into an affirmation that new gods are indeed needed to combat the oppres- sion. The gods will become ‘an animal not yet heard of. Deadly, watching, ready in the forest. Something not human’ (p. 62). They will emerge in the second part of the play.


Just as Part One takes place before the Roman occupation, so Part Two is located in AD 515, over one hundred years after the last Roman left Britain, and on the Irish border in 1980. The Roman occupation of Britain lasted some 367 years, from the conquest by Claudius in AD 43 up to the with- drawal of the garrisons to Gaul by Constantine 111 in AD 407. The last remnants of Roman administration were driven out by AD 410, leaving Bri- tain to fend for itself. Brenton places part of the second half of his play in what is conventionally known as ’the Dark Ages’, that is, the period from AD 410, to the amval of Augustine at Canterbury in AD 597. Detailed reconstruc- tion of this period is highly conjectural but the general outlines are clear.27 Britain at this stage contained conflicting groups, amongst which were the Scoti (the Irish) and thePicti (those living beyond the Firth of Forth). Neither of these groups had come within the frontiers of the Roman province. In addition, there were the citizens of Roman Britain, left to their own devices after AD 410. Beyond, in Europe, were others who had always lived outside Roman frontiers, whose homes lay on the North Sea coast from the Jutland peninsula to the Rhine mouths and beyond. The Latin writers called them Saxones.28 An account of part of this period, disputed in its details by some authorities, is to be found in theDe Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (c. 550) by a British monk, Gildas. He tells of the decision by Vortigern, who reigned C. 42.5455, to seek the aid of the Saxons in the fight against their traditional enemies from the north and west. The Saxons were given lands in eastern England. As their numbers grew, they rebelled against their British paymas- ters and a period of fluctuating warfare culminated in the victory of the Brit- ish at Mons Badonicus at the end of the fifth century, a victory which, says Gildas, inaugurated a period of peace which lasted up untilGildas began his account. Gildas makes Vortigern the scapegoat for allowing the adventus Saxonurn. He is also thought by some to have endorsed the Pelagian heresy (which denied the doctrine of original sin) in Christian Britain, to counter which the Pope in 429 sent to Britain Germanus, bishop of Awterre in Gad 29

When Brenton begins the second part of the play, it is set very precisely. The figure of Cai in Scene Two continues the succession of Celtic figures encountered in Part One. He is a veteran fighter of the Saxons.30 He was at the battle of Mons Badonicus and, since he refers to twenty-one years of peace (p. 85), dates the battle for the play’s purposes at 494. The priests who arrive in Scene Two to try to persuade Cai and his daughters, Corda and Morgana, to leave their farm and seek protection are Christian. They are met with contempt by Cai who, after the great battle, had buried a Celtic idol in his fields to watch over him. As his ancestors had done, Cai put blood on his land as a blessing and dismisses the new gods represented by the Christians, although one daughter, Morgana, is a convert. The villagers will go to

12 Critical Quarterly, voL 23, no. 3

Camulodunum to seek safety. The successor of Cassivellaunus, Cunobelinus, had conquered the Trinovantes of Essex in the first century AD and had moved his capital from Wheathampstead to Camulodunum (modern Colchester). The capital had, with the advent of Claudius, become the centre of a Roman province with Plautius as governor. As news of a fresh Saxon invasion arrives, the people flock to a stronghold, just as Cassivel- launis in Part One had led his people into the great fort. The conflict is mul- tiplied, Celt against Christian, British against Saxon, daughters against father. Amongst all the panic sits one stubborn old man, refusing to leave what is his:

I'll stay where 1 was born. And watch. It all- Come - Again (p. 81)

As in Part One, where the arrival of the Romans is created not by a massive display of arms but by three stray soldiers, so in Part Two, the reality of the Saxons is shown by the arrival of one mortally injured Saxon fighter. 'Ic eom anhaga, iserne wund' (p. 83). What is remote is made immediate. Cai, as his ancestors, kills the foreigner on his land and wants his blood as a sacrifice. He is killed by his daughter, Corda, as her temfied sister refutes Pelagius:

Saint Pelagius said we're not born into the world eviL We make our own sin . . . (To herself:) Yes, we make our own sin. The Priest said they call that a heresy and they sent a Bishop from Rome, with soldiers to make us learn. . . Learn that we're born in sin. Even in the cradle, bad Filthy. . . (PP. 87-8)

Both daughters now are aiminals and become wanderers, as had Conlag and Daui before them. As the Saxons lay waste to southern England, Brenton introduces a

further element as a means of impacting early and contemporary history. Parts of the story of King Arthur find their way into his account. Thomas Chichester, a British army officer, lies in an Irish field, waiting to kill ORourke, an LRA. leader. In Scene One, he links the Celts in Ireland with the family fields at home near Colchester which, he says, 'could be the site for Arthur's last battle. AD 515'.j1 Chichester does not doubt the historical reality of Arthur and modem opinions support him in disputing the idea that Arthur was a figment of romance. A recent work shows that Arthur was not a king and founded no dynasty. He was rather 'the leader of the com- bined forces of the small kingdoms into which sub-Roman Britain had dis- solved . . . His major victory) the siege of Mount Badon, was fought against the English about 490% . .'.32 It was a victory which, though inaugurating a


period of peace, proved only a temporary lull in the penetration of the Sax- ons, a movement which became irresistible. However, Arthuis signifi- cance, of course, developed subsequently in literature and romance. As Alcock says, 'a defeated people cherished tales true or false, sober or exagg- erated, of a period when they were the victors . . .'.33 If theDruids, asCaesar had n0ted,3~ set as a task for novices the memorising of immense amounts of poetry, in effect, carried and maintained their culture by this method, the elimination of theDruids by the Saxon invasionj5 did not extinguish the cultural integrity of large numbers of the older population of Britain. The legend of Arthur's return persisted and ledGeoffrey of Monmouth to ipsert into hisHisforiu Regurn Brifanniae of the twelfth century a version of Merlin's Prophecies, which he assigns to the reign of Vortigem, and in which the fore- telling of Arthur is announced

She that is oppressed shall at last prevail, and shall resist the fierceness of the strangers. For the Boar of Cornwall shall bring SUCCOUT and shall trample their necks beneath his feet. The islands of the Ocean shall be subdued to his power, and he shall possess the forests ofGauL The house of Romulus shall dread his fierceness, and his end shall be doubtful. In the mouth of the peoples shall he be celebrated and his deeds be food unto the tellers of tales.36

The legends of Arthur, 'EX quondam, ~ x q u e futurus' have persist&, in mutated forms. Layamon's Brut sees him specifically as anti-English: 'but once was a sage called Merlin; he said with words - and his sayings were truth - that Arthur should yet come to make an end of the English'.37 Brenton prefers the myth of Arthur 'I believe that Arthur was invented some terrible even- ing in a ditch for a good historical reason. He was needed. He gave voice to the aspirations of a defeated people, the once and future king . . .'.38 Thus in the last scene of the play, the fiction of Arthur is created by the two refugee cooks. The first cook, tiring of his trade, decides to turn poet and tells the story of 'a King who never was', whose reign was thought of 'as a golden age, lost and yet to come' (p. 105). His story uses details of the legend and includes the treachery of Modred who took the crown while Arthur was away and maniedGuinevere, together with the last battle at Camlann. Pres- sed by Morgana and Coda, who have become wenillas, to supply a name, the first cook says:

Any old name dear (To the SECOND COOK) What was his name?

S ~ N D COOK Right. Er-any old name. Arthur? Arthur? (P. 105)


As I have suggested with regard to Part One, the fate of the Mother’s small Celtic group stands for the fate of the Celts in Europe in the face of the Romans and theGermans. In Part Two, the continuing integrity of the Celts is given clear prominence. Chichester tells an Army colleague that ’It’sCelts we’re fighting in Ireland. We won’t get anywhere ’til we know what that means. . . If King Arthur walked out of those trees, now - know what he’d look like to us? One more fucking mick‘ (p. 77). Fifth-century Britain and twentieth-century Ireland are pulled together in Chichesteis convictions. The bridge between them is by means of one of the most subtle moments in the play. As the LRA. leader arrives in Scene Seven, Chichester comes face to face with the man he knows as Sheamus NaillO’Rourke. He bears a celebrated name in Irish history. From the fifth century onwards ’the ruling dynasty of northern and central Ireland were the ui Ned, the descendants of NiallNoigiallach’.39 With the rise of Miall and his family to the control of central and northern Ireland ‘Irish history really begins’.40 Further, the same authorities note that:

By their annexation of the ancient Ulaid capital of Emain Macha about the middle of the fifth century [the dynasty of the UiNkill] gained a stronghold close to St. Patrick’s sanctuary of Armagh, and with it the patronage of the chief saint of the defeated Ulaid . . . its possession may have given to the Ui Nkill the control of spiritual and intellectual, no less than of political, prestige, and of the teach- ing and writing of

Chichester looks at a man whose name identifies him with an ancient figure, celebrated by poets as an heroic warrior. Tradition has it that Niall met his death abroad; ‘that he met it while raiding in Britain is by no means improbable’. 42 An Englishman and an Irishman meet on ground once owned by the family of the UiNeill and which now is disputed land. As the Mother sought to defend her farms, as the old heathen, Cai, stays stub- bornly on his fields, so ORourke claims his territory. What is stated in this moment is not simply the meeting of Celt and Englishman and not the vague association of the fifth century with the twentieth. It is the story of the history in between, of existing and viable cultures under pressure. It involves the fact that Welsh aspirations, surfacing recently, did not disappear with the death of the last Welsh prince, Llywelyn apGruffudd, in 1282 (the epi- graph from Taliesin which prefaces the play is not casual), that Brittany was only formally annexed to France in 1532, that oldGaelic customs survived in Scotland even longer than in Ireland, and that the flight of the Earls Tyrone and Tyrconnell from Ireland in 1607 did not put an end to the matter. It leads, by a process of coherently argued, as well asfelt, ideas to Brenton’s absolute conviction that ’what my play says is that all empire is bad. The Republican cause is just. The border is a crime. But bald statements are no


good. To convince an audience of the truth of my arguments, I find myself writing about Britain in 54 BC and a British officer going off his head in an Irish cornfield today. . .143

I11

Part of the difficulty experienced by many critics in trying to respond to much recent theatre has been to do with a failure to recognise new forms of theatrical expression. In 1966, Penelope Gilliatt observed:

We blunder badly when we call ours an age of theatrical naturalism. That is mostly a judgment about bad telly. At its best the temperament of our theatre is a lot closer to the Elizabethan. It is the expression of an age brutally straddled between one period and another, and struggling to understand itself with plays full of role-playing, disguises, shifts of vision and pulling of the time focus. When dramatists find the theatre as crucial as this, significant plays are written and audiences respond.44

Gilliatt was writing this of Bond, but it is significant that the comment applies equally well, in t e rah , toHare, Arden, McGrath and Brenton. Behind Brenton’s movement into larger theatres (see p. 4) is a conviction to do both with form and audience:

These plays are big, in cast, staging, theme and publicly declared ambition (they do want to change the world, influence opinion, enter fights over political issues); they are ’Jacobean’ in a mix of the tragic and comic taking great pleasure in the surprises and shocks of entertainment the huge stage can arm the playwright with as a showman; they are epic in that they are many scened, full of stories, ironic and argumentative, and deliberately written as ’history plays for n0w1.4S

A pugnacious, exuberant, argumentative and presentational form of theatre has always been at the root of Brenton’s writing. It is not to be confused with abandoning the basics of the craft or the shaping of the play’s form. One of the successes of this play is the tightness imposed by the time scheme and how this is shown. Part One moves from before dawn on 27 August 54 BC to the dawn of 28 August. The action consists of episodes taken from a period of a little more than twenty-four hours. The lighting for this indicates the progression of the day. From night in Scene One, it becomes ‘An early morn- ing light‘ for Scene Two and the Mother‘s confrontation with the envoys from Cassivellaunus. Scenes Three and Four take place in the woods as the three brothers chase the escaping Conlag. Scene Five takes place towards the end of daylight and sees Caesar reimposing order among his staff offic- ers. Scene Six, the suicide of Marban, is in moonlight, and Seven is set at dawn as the slave is killed by the British army. It is in Seven that the play


pivots into 1980 and Ireland, and the scenes depicting Chichester's waiting for and finally meeting O'Rourke follow the pattern set by Part One. Chichester is seen first at dawn in Scenes One and Three and asleep in the late afternoon of Scene Five. He meets his death (Scene Seven) at sunset. The scenes in Part Two, which concern Cai, his daughters, and Adona, a Roman matron, accompanied by her steward and the two cooks, fit into the time scheme set by the Chichester scenes (these are Scenes Two, Four, Six and Eight). The final Scene Eight is set in brilliant moonlight. What this allows Brenton to do is set together a series of parallels, designed to draw the two locations of Part Two and the single location of Part One together. It is a method which is defended by Dr Johnson: 'The drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions; and why may not the second imitation rep- resent an action that happened years after the first, if it be so connected with it, that nothing but time can be supposed to intervene? Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of OUTS.'^^

Within this carefully-constructed time scheme, Brenton gives episodes which are part of the total events of the two days. What is established in the opening scene is a number of ideas and approaches which extend through the whole play. Conlag and Daui are refugees, criminals, without land or community. They are also a comic double act. In their petulant resignations and sporadic outbursts, they recall Beckett's Vladimar and Estragon:

The criminal life. It's the boils that get you. Yeah, when you go on the run, you don't think about getting boils. (P. 11)

They also create the immediate sense of foreignness they feel, their readi- ness to destroy if they need to, and a superstitious fear of the unknown, the 'things in the trees' (p. 13). As they are driven into a strange country to meet their deaths, so their alternating aggression and fear becomes a motif for most of the figures in the play. Conlag and Daui may be able to destroy the slave, but, like her, are at immediate risk with the arrival of Brac, Viridio and Marban in Scene Two. What is not known is mythologised. This foreign Bri- tain may have a 'Sea of dogs! Waves of tails! Rabid surf, all froth and teeth. . .' (p. 12). Similarly, Roman soldiers may have the sun shining out of their navels: 'Two navels. And big. very big men. In metaL When they walk they clank' (p. 19). The contrast between what is imagined and what is is constantly drawn in the early scenes. As Brenton portrays the life of theCel- tic community in scene two the First Envoy tries desperately to describe 'Roman': 'But the Romans are different. They are - (He gestures, t y i n g to find the word. He fairs. He tries again.) A nation. Nation. What? A great family? No.


A People- No. They are one, huge thing’ (p. 27). Even as he describes this ’thing’, his king‘s fort is being attacked. Even as the Mother reveals she knows of the army, the brothers are in the woods after Conlag. As they rest in Scene Three, the ‘thing’ materialises in the shape of the stray soldiers. The brutal actuality of what formerly was on a par with the ’things in the trees’ comes out of the trees and destroys them, at the same time as the detached cohorts of Scene Five are destroying the Mother and some of her people in Scene Four. The action is shown as separate but the implication is of simul- taneous events. The Roman guards closing line in Scene Five (‘That‘s the speed of modern warfare’, p. 59) stretches back over the earlier scenes.

Initially, the meeting of the three Romans and the three brothers (Scene Three) is treated as a game. Neither side understands the other‘s language, with the exception of Marban, who knows some Latin For the Romans, the brothers are ’Three wogs . . . Not Trinovante. Not round here’ (p. 37); for the brothers, the Romans look like other men. The Celts seek the trees for safety, the Romans seek to keep them away from the forest. The game becomes deadly as the Romans wound Brac, whose dying screams punctuate the rest of the scene. Viridio delivers a series of threats designed to frighten his enemies and is dispatched efficiently. Only after Marban cuts the first soldier and is left dazed by the impact of the shields does the sexual assault take place, with the second soldier cynically amused by what the third soldier does. As Marban is violated, the second soldier tries to explain to him who they are: ’Persia? The other side of the world? , . . World? . . . Empire?’ (p. 42), while the meaning of Empire is being shown to the audience by the third soldier. It is a briliiant moment, deliberately designed to shock an audience into judgement. It would not have worked so powerfully if the object of the rape had been a woman and thus a confirmation for the audience that the received wisdom of how armies act does not need further exploration. Bren- ton is not interested in confirming prejudice but in forcing an audience to think. The attempted rape of Marban, because of the commentary of the second soldier to a dazed and bewildered figure, grows rapidly in the scene to a metaphor of extraordinary power as an indictment of what is done to a community. That second soldier is a vital figure in the latter part of the scene. Alone with Marban, he tells of his uncle, a slave who became a freeman and joined a religious cult. The soldier anticipates his own freedom when dis- charged from the army and talks to someone who has just become a slave. Within his own limited terms, the soldier shows compassion and cleans phlegm out of Marban’s mouth and finds then that the slave speaks Latin. Bernard Levin’s judgement on the scandal surrounding the play applies with particular force to the scene which engendered most of the hysteria. I t is ‘A sad and sorry comment on the febrile silliness of so much of our public


ti m 'C

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life, and on the ease with which that silliness spawns notoriety and even power for those who batten on it, and penalizes gifted and creative men who live by a code of artistic integrity that is as unintelligible to their accusers as was the speech of the Anaent Celts to Caesar's arrny.'4' After Scene Five, which demonstrates the total confusion of the survivors of the attack on the village, the play moves to Caesar and the business of regrouping after the day's events. The location of the scene is as Scene Three. The bodies of Brac and Viridio are joined by the Mother and her husband, as the business of organising a camp gets under way. We are shown a way of proceeding abso- lutely different from theCelts and aCaesar coldly angry at the inability of his legionary legate to control his army. The legate is officially rebuked and pri- vately his death is determined so that it looks like an accident. Caesar is a man who obeys his own logic as a military figure. However angry he is at the mess, the victims are still 'a wretched bunch of wog farmers. . . in a filthy backwater of humanity' (p. 54), of no importance, a minor impediment, against which his having toothache seems far more distracting. Caesar looks at Marban and is revolted by the shivering. naked boy, and frees him after putting round his neck a pendant of Venus, as if he is branding Marban. As a group of Celts fling stones from the trees at the Romans, Caesar decides to go south, his task accomplished. What he has done is interpreted by Marban in the following scene to the village survivors. Caesar came to Britain in search of freshwater pearls. What he left behind was 'Generation after generation, cataracts of terror in the eyes of your children. And in the eyes of husband for wife and wife for husband, hatred of the suffering that is bound to come again' (p. 62). It is Marban who, before he dies, speaks of the resistance to come and of the death of the old gods. As he falls on a knife, the first part of the play ends, as it began, with the two refugees. Conlag and the slave have gone south and amved on the north bank of the Thames. Conlag has been running since Scene Two and is finally killed by the slave. She in turn is killed by the Roman army which, in a stunning climax to Part One, reappears as the British army in Ireland. The only thing that has changed is the technology. ow-

The dominant visual image of Part Two is the one single setting of a field of harvested corn. The implications of harvest become a grim irony rather than a pastoral refuge. Within this waits Chichester, an assassin with visions of the past running through his head. Each scene carefully overlaps the other. Chichester stays on stage until he is shot, so that the scenes set in AD 515 are part of Chichester's dreaming and of the process which sends him mad. As he waits for O'Rourke to arrive, his dreams are of Saxon raids upon the Celts and upon the remnants of Roman Society in Britain. It is clear that Chichester has two missions. As well as the official one, he speaks,


echoing Marban, of ‘A sense - of the order - of things’ (p. 77). It is Chiches- ter who introduces the idea of Arthur and links his finding a pagan god in his motheis field near Colchester with his understanding of this new war against modern Celts. The field in which he lies drinking then becomes both the Irish cornfield and the field near Camulodunum. As the Saxons force the villagers to flee, apart from old Cai and his daughters, another Saxon, Chichester, by his very presence, is shown as an invader in Ireland. The visions add to Chichester’s instability, What he represents is shown powerfully in the fourth scene, as a wounded Saxon crashes out of the trees on to Cai’s field, and cannot understand why he is met with stones: ’Waelhreowan men! Is eower hete swa to anum eltheoditan geriht?’ (p. 83). The Saxon is killed as an invader and what begins to be posed by the play is Cai’s stubborn refusal to move against the resolve of one daughter, Corda, to take practical action against usurpers. She kills her father and with him his gods, and takes to the road. She becomes a guerrilla, as Marban had prophesied, and both daughters, now outlaws, take to the road. Her modern equivalent becomes in Scene Five the Irish Woman, on whose farm Chichester dozes. She is the liaison between Chichester and O’Rourke, suspicious, careful and equally as deadly as Corda. While Chichester waits for the appointment, Brenton reverts to the Comedy of Conlag and Daui in the shape of two cooks, travel- ling with Adona and her steward. Her house burnt, this ‘Roman’ matron lives in the past, an archaic figure, dispossessed of her lands and property by the encroaching Saxons, but still dreaming of the return of the legions to restore her to her former glory. The mixture theatrically is a daring one, the pathetic hysteria of the plague-ridden matron, the threat of further imperialism and the laconic comments of the cooks

SECONDCOOKO~ no. I’m standing here looking at a corpse.

The STEWARD and the FIRST COOK look at each other.

FIRSTCOOK He’s going to be sick. STEWARD You two are the lowest of the low. FIRSTCOOK. Dunno. When you come down to it, I’m meat

And I think iYs Saxon.

And I’m going to be sick.

and he’s vegetables. (P. 95)

The steward kills Adona and the cooks run off. The steward, who gained his freedom by whatever route possible, sees at the end of the scene a real possi- bility of total freedom: ’ThankGod war has come’ (p. 98) and his joy at the prospect is embodied in the following scene, where Chichester and O’Rourke finally meet. It is a meeting of reality versus romance. The British officer reveals his secret mission as well as his official one. His madness con- joins, Roman, Saxon and the British in Ireland and in his overwhelming sense


of past and present, he identifies himself with Arthur as the salvation of the Celts, and the bringer of peace. But his cries are mere liberalism against the deadliness of the animal of which Marban spoke and which now assumes the form of ORourke, his armed men, and the unyielding anger of the Irish woman. ’I don’t want to hear of this British soldier’s humanity. And how he comes to be howling in the middle of my country. And how he thinks Ire- land is a tragedy. Ireland’s troubles are not a tragedy. They are the crimes his country has done mine. That he does to me, by standing there’ (pp. 100-1). AsChichester realises his imminent death, he reverts to his training. His colleague, Maitland, in Scene One, dismissed all Celts as ’murdering bastards’ and now Chichester uses the same phrase as he is shot.

The final scene of the play brings the cooks and the daughters together in an uneasy alliance against the Saxons. Corda seeks fighters and is to be ‘A mother of killers . . . Children brought up right‘ (p. 104), and the beginnings of a long struggle is born. Faced with one implacable figure, the First Cook turns poet and, Merlin-like, creates Arthur. The name is irrelevant, the impulse is not. The play ends with a beginning. the consequences of which take place in AD 1980.

In his appraisal of the play, Bernard Levin notes accurately that ‘In both the Roman conquest of Britain and the Protestant conquest of Ireland a genuinely dominant alien culture was imposed on an indigenous one which continued to resist it, the very resistance being rendered irrepressible by the attempts to crush Brenton’s play is one of the most important contribu- tions for many years to what he sees as the long-standing disgrace of the British in Ireland. Whatever the nature of individual political opinion, that it should be dismissed overnight by drama critics and be the subject of attempted persecution, not on the grounds that its premises are false (since there’s been little or no analysis of the play in these terms) but on the grounds that it incites to buggery, is an insult to a serious writer. While we treat our writers in this fashion, nothing will be resolved.

Notes Plays and Players, February 1971. Ibid., March 1971. Ibid., July 1973. Ibid., September 1973. The Times, 10 July 1976. New Society, 4 November 1976. Guardian, 22 August 1978. Sunday Times, 29 June 1980. The text of the play is that published by Eyre Methuen in 1980. This text is the one used from the first day of rehearsal. A second, revised edition was pub-


10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30

31

32 33 31 35 36 37 38 39 40

lished at the end of April 1981. I am grateful toNick Hem, Drama Editor of Eyre Methuen, for sending me an advance copy. Guardian, 17 October 1980. 19 October 1980. As reported in the Guardian, 9 March 1981. 12 November 1980. These were Robert Cushman, Observer, 19 October 1980; Jay Cocks, Time, 8 December 1980; Bernard Levin, The Times, 11 March 1981; Oswyn Murray, T.L.S., 24 October 1980. See M. Grant, Julius Caesar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), pp. 125- 7, and the coloured but accurate account given by RobertGraves inclaudius the God (Pen- guin Books, 1968), p. 214ff. M. Dillon and N. K. Chadwick, The Celtic Realms (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963, p. 322. J. M. deNavarro, ’TheCelts in Britain and their art‘, The Heritageof Early Britain, by M. P. Charlesworthet. al. (Bell, 1952), p. 66. Ibid., p. 60. Murray, op. cit., n. 14. Op. cit., n. 16, pp. 134-5. Ibid., p. 95ff. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 108. De Bello Gallico, vi, 13 (translated H. J. Edwards, Loeb Library, 1917). Ibid., vi, 16. Quoted in the National Theatre programme. SeeD. J. V. Fisher, The Anglo-Saxon Age c. 400-2042 (Longman, 1973), ’Intro- ductiop’. P. H. Blair, Roman Britain and Early England 55 B.C.-AD. 872 (Nelson, 1963), p. 150. Ibid., pp. 159-61. In the second edition of the play, the word ’English’ is revised throughout to ‘Saxon’. This is the revised reading for the second edition. It testifies to the difficulty surrounding Arthurian accounts, let alone the precise locations of the battles Arthur is said to have fought. See L. Alcock, Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology A.D. 367-634 (Men Lane: The Penguin Press, 1971). Alcock quotes from the Easter Annals in the British Historical Miscellany: ‘The strife of Camlann in which Arthur and Modred perished. And there was plague in Bri- tain and Ireland’ (p. 45). This entry is dated 539. Op. cit., n. 31, p. 359. Ibid., p. 364. Op. cit., n 24, vi, 14. See T. D. Kenrick, The Druids (Methuen, 2nd ed, 1928), p. 29. Quoted in E. K. Chambers,Arthuroj Britain (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927), p. 25. Ibid., p. 106. Sunday Times, 12 October 1980. Op. cit., n. 16, p. 62. Ibid., p. 59.


11 42 43 44 45

46

47 48

Bid., p. 63. lbid., p. 60. Sunday Times, 1 2 October 1980. Obseruer, 24 April 1966. M. Hay and P. Roberts, ‘An interview with Howard Brenton’, Performing Arts Journal, 111, No. 3, (winter 1979), p. 138. ’Preface to Shakespeare‘, 1765; from W. K. Wimsatt (ed),Dr Johnson on Shakes- peare (Penguin, 1969), p. 71. The Times, 11 March 1981. aid.

WILLIAM OXLEY

The hiker An occasional cloud smokes from The sun, hills fade in haze, And like tangled insignias trees bunch Decoratively along the horizon To which fields fold in road-cracked Sheets. A silver mark denotes a lake Lying in some glacially- thumbed hollow, While points of sound stab everywhere As intermittent bird calls break in air.

The hiker leans a sweat-clammed Back to age-old rock, his mind Induced to stillness surveying distance: The stress of the scramble Up stone-encrusted unyielding paths Has forced a glut of blood to veins And now the palpitating slow view Quiets weariness and a soft languor Loosens all his limbs - Till imagined further freedoms Of topography draw him on again And rested, liberated, he climbs.

howard brenton's romans

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