Romans: A Novel, Almeida Theatre review – a uniquely extraordinary work

OMG! I mean OMG doubled!! This is amazing! Or is it? Can Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel at the Almeida Theatre really be the best play on the London stage, or is it not? Can it be both brilliant and exasperating? At one and the same time? Probably. Maybe. Okay, now you’re in the zone. 

What’s instantly compelling is the sheer ambition of this dream-like family epic. And I mean epic. Across something like a century and more, Birch shows us what happens to the three sons of Henry Roman, a Victorian gentleman whose brother John is a high-ranking soldier, and whose family live in an English country mansion. The sons are Jack, Marlow and Edmund – the Romans. 

Although the three brothers Roman are alive from the Edwardian era to the present time, they don’t age in the usual way. Superhumanly, they are symbols of manhood across the decades of the 20th and 21st centuries. Jack, who at one point is some seven years older than Marlow, is a soldier, then a writer, then a cult guru, while Marlow is a colonial explorer, then a cuthroat industrialist and finally a tech entrepreneur. Edmund, some three years younger than him, is a damaged, homeless individual. With a mix of references to creative non-fiction and fabulation, Birch creates a poetic tale through some exhilarating storytelling (at least at the start). 

As indicated by the play’s title, the course of their lives is told through the evolving form of the literary novel. So the first part is realistic in the manner of the 19th-century state-of-the-nation novel; the second more fragmented to reflect the impact of modernism; the third a postmodernist knowing parody and humorous satire; and the fourth an equally fun meta-modernist mash up. The themes of loss (a dead mother), self-fashioning (many travels), personal growth (therapy) and conflict (sibling antagonism) emerge as they experience abusive childhoods, break away from their father and then struggle to make a mark on the world (in Edmund’s case unsuccessfully). 

Their childhood trauma has produced a series of damaged masculinities in a piece where the scent of testosterone dominates every scene. When the women appear, at first as Jack’s wife Clarissa (a nod to Virginia Woolf) and Marlow’s wife Rosa, Birch specifies that they should stand at the front of the stage and talk through microphones in order to assert their female presence in this masculinist scenario. Meanwhile, not only have the boys suffered from the fists of their father, and absence of their mother, but also from betrayal. At boarding school, Marlow wants Jack to protect him from the violence and sexual abuse of the masters, but he fails to do so. 

Both Jack, who was also abused, and Marlow grow into symbols of aggressive individualism, one in the arts and the other in business. The isolated and armoured lonesomeness of masculinity comes across in the fury of their ambition, and their contempt for the softer and more inter-personal attitudes of the women. By contrast, Edmund, the youngest, struggles to overcome the trauma of their father’s abuse and then his suicide, which literally leaves its mark on the walls of the family home for ever. To the irritation of his brothers, he gets into trouble with the police, spends time in jail and becomes homeless. 

In the much more satirical second half of the evening, the writer Jack has become the charismatic leader of a commune, preaching love through drugs and visions of an imaginary meteor (cast pictured above). His patriarchal power is expressed through the willing submission of his acolytes, such as Anna and Timothy (a survivor of colonial exploitation). While Esther, a film-maker, attempts to shoot a documentary about him and the commune, these alternative cultists quietly and subtly seduce her – or do they? As always, there’s a lot of ambiguity in these scenes: in this case, Birch asks questions about how the magnetic power of charismatic men can appeal to women. 

By the end of this three-hour extravaganza, Jack is confronted by his estranged daughter Miranda, who is now also a writer, once again provoking questions about how the children of celebrities benefit from their parents’ fame. In these fractured scenes, the contemporary themes of toxic misogyny, cancel culture and the manosphere splash about in a tub of freezing water while today’s loud podcasters demand ketamine. At the same time, our dissatisfaction with urban living is articulated, once again satirically, by Edmund leading a group of men who try to live like animals (urban foxes and badgers are favs) while the pretentions of high-end restaurants are mercilessly mocked. 

None of this conveys quite how wild, wild, wild the experience of watching Romans: A Novel really is. One minute a solemn man is delivering a monologue, at another characters are chasing each other through time and space, then there’s an intimate scene, then an excruciating satire, then a funny joke, then a weird turn. Some bits are emotionally powerful; some bits are vivid like cartoons; some bits misfire; some bits are too long. How can a review sum up the kaleidoscopic wonder of this wild, wild, wild piece? Not very well. So a quick anecdote: I leave the theatre and, on Upper Street, a random stranger, who says he’s a writer, spots my programme and tells me he saw the show the week before: he hated it. We discuss it in a fractured, uneasy way, then part company. I only wish I’d recorded him. 

So this ambitious experimental play, often throwing anti-realism against naturalism, is a drama that is both mind-blowing and exasperating. It is bold, bold, bold, but also rather banal. It doesn’t really say much about masculinity, about tortured and selfish individualism, that we haven’t already heard. It deliberately gives the women smaller roles, but makes sure that the playwright’s sardonic opinions about gender roles are foregrounded. At a time when most British new writing remains timid and wedded to banal naturalism, this play feels thrilling in the ambition and energy of its overall gesture – even when some bits cry out for editing. 

Like Succession, on which Birch was story editor for season two, Romans: A Novel has its ludicrous and even preposterous moments, but there really is nothing like it at the moment on the London stage. Directed by her partner Sam Pritchard, and designed with stark impact on an occasionally revolving stage by Merle Hensel, the evening boasts excellent performances of its sketchy characters by Kyle Soller, Oliver Johnstone and Stuart Thompson as Jack, Marlow and Edmund, while Declan Conlon, Olivier Huband and Jerry Killick play several characters each, both major and minor, and the several women are acted by Yanexi Enriquez, Adelle Leonce and Agnes O’Casey. Love it, or hate it, this play is double-plus OMG!

• Romans: A Novel at the Almeida Theatre until 11 October 
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk

• @AleksSierz