Cinders in a Riddle

Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain was staged at the National Theatre in Autumn 1980. It became notorious for a scene in which a Roman soldier rapes a young Celtic druid. Reports of the scene raised the ire of Mary Whitehouse, who since the 1960s had become a prominent conservative campaigner against obscenity, sex and violence in the media. Police scrutinised the play, and the director Michael Bogdanov was unsuccessfully pursued through the courts under the Sexual Offences Act. But the controversy distracted from the play's subject. Brenton's play is a vision of British history that swoops from one period to another, juxtaposing and sometimes overlaying different times. In 54 BC, two Irish vagrants happen upon a tribe of Celts in southern England; one vagrant is gleefully killed by the Celtic boys. The Celtic tribe in turn is massacred and ruined by the invading Roman army of Julius Caesar. In ad 515, a century after the Romans have departed, the Celts are in fear of a Saxon army. Another 1,400 years on, at the end of the 1970s, the British Army are on patrol in Northern Ireland, where an undercover British officer, Thomas Chichester, is discovered and shot by Irish Republicans. As the play develops, the gaps between these moments become smaller: different historical moments quickly alternate, cover the same patch of ground, and echo each other.

Brenton has at times written agit-prop, but this play's exact intent is not self-evident. As it jumps between epochs its characters offer various conclusions, which relativise one other. A character who seems set for a major part in the acts to come is often abruptly, brutally dispatched a moment later. In fact this is central to the play’s sense: that the history of the British Isles has resounded with brutality, from one age to another; that there are no necessary heroes or happy endings, nor any absolute monopoly on violence.