Not gonna lie – Alice Birch’s fragmentary portrait of masculinity, studied over 150 years through the evolving form of the novel, is an effortful watch, but a rewarding one. It features superb performances from Kyle Soller, Oliver Johnstone and Stuart Thompson as Jack, Marlow and Edmund Roman, three brothers driven into exaggerated and impossibly long-lived caricatures of manhood – the soldier-novelist-guru, the explorer-magnate-tech bro, the damaged dropout – by childhood trauma.
Originally known for singular stage plays, Birch has moved into film (Lady Macbeth, the End We Start From, the forthcoming Die, My Love) and TV (Succession, Normal People, Dead Ringers). Romans implies a desperation to escape the conventional, linear narratives of the screen, although there’s an obvious link back to the generational, testosterone-driven toxicity of Succession. Directed by Birch’s partner Sam Pritchard, the play is hugely ambitious and willfully uneven, profligate with ideas, at times exasperating. But having slept on it, I find it’s stayed with me on a deep level.
