How to dramatise a text that is part travelogue, part exploration of responses to the almost 400-year-long Roman occupation of Britain? Scottish playwright David Greig follows the example of some of the mythographers, historians, archaeologists, poets and musicians cited by the book’s author, Charlotte Higgins: he plugs wide gaps between facts with imaginative projections.
In Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, Higgins mentions in passing that on her research trips to sites around the UK, she was sometimes driven by her boyfriend, Matthew, in his battered VW camper van. Greig makes this scant piece of information the basis for a road trip romcom featuring highly fictionalised versions of the real people – as Higgins makes clear in an article about the play written for our sister paper the Guardian, of which she is chief culture critic.
