“Romans: A Novel” has a doubly confusing title. First, this is not a novel but a play — a stage adaptation, as it were, of a fictitious literary work. Second, it has nothing to do with the residents of the Italian capital, ancient or modern, but concerns three brothers whose last name happens to be Roman: Jack (Kyle Soller) and Marlow (Oliver Johnstone), who are carted off to boarding school after their mother dies while giving birth to Edmund (Stuart Thompson), and are abused there by a sadistic teacher. All three brothers spend their adult lives running away from themselves.
Jack does a stint in the army before becoming a successful novelist, mining the lives of his brothers and wife for material. Marlow travels the globe and commits atrocities — including chopping off the limbs of Indigenous folk — on the way to becoming a mega-wealthy industrialist. Much to the disgust of his restlessly ambitious brothers, young Edmund is riddled with self-doubt and lives a vagrant, off-grid existence. Their father, an alcoholic idler, kills himself.
“Romans: A Novel” runs at the Almeida Theater in London through Oct. 11. Written by Alice Birch — the playwright behind the lauded “Anatomy of a Suicide” — and directed by Sam Pritchard, the play offers two modish genres for the price of one: the familiar trauma narrative and the earnest inquiry into masculinity. Although the play’s ambition is impressive, the plotting is unsatisfying — not so much a narrative arc as three parallel strands that don’t converge — and thankfully this production is carried by some very fine individual performances.
Soller (“Andor”, “The Inheritance”) is entirely convincing as the egotistical author, a supreme wallower given to pensive locutions and bouts of selective, self-serving indignation. Johnstone’s Marlow has the cold self-possession of a man obsessed with dominating others, and Thompson’s Edmund has an affectingly hapless charm — his compulsive self-effacement is all the more conspicuous, and poignant, because he is physically the largest of the trio. Declan Conlon, playing multiple roles, is the pick of an equally talented supporting cast.
Family psychodrama gives way to topical satire after the intermission, when Jack parlays his literary fame into founding a yogic sex cult in which he plies impressionable fans with psychedelic drugs. After an inevitable public cancellation, he meets with his estranged daughter, who has become a writer of autobiographical fiction, and belittles her work while seeking her forgiveness for his absence. (Though it’s not his finest hour, he gets a big laugh with a dig at the current literary fad for eschewing speech marks in dialogue.) Marlow, meanwhile, is feted on a macho podcast, takes ice baths and boasts about getting blood transfusions from his kids.
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The post On This Stage, It’s Bleak Being a Man appeared first on New York Times.
