Howard Brenton

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Stephen Grecco

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Howard Brenton has written a dozen plays during the past ten years, almost all of them controversial. To no one's great surprise, The Romans in Britain is not an exception…. Brenton's intention seems to be to shock his audience into an awareness of how obscene and absurd the world really is, particularly that part which he inhabits, Great Britain, where he detects violence lurking beneath the surface of apparently respectable people who hold positions of power and leadership. Brenton denies that the play is overtly political, but it is hard to see how it could be viewed otherwise, equating as it does the Roman legions with the British military in Northern Ireland. Described by its author as a "peace play" The Romans in Britain, when it isn't straining to be left-wing hip, is largely about survival, of both individuals and groups, and about the dreams and myths we create in order to make survival possible. At the end of the play the story of King Arthur is born, to give voice to the aspirations of the defeated.

Plays for the Poor Theatre, whose title seems to have been inspired by the works of the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, is a collection of five short plays from Brenton's early involvement in London's "fringe" (off-off-Broadway type) theatre. Several of the pieces smack of 1920s agitprop, but all go beyond the merely tendentious through the playwright's facility for creating highly lyrical language and wildly amusing situations. Christie in Love, the best of the group, is concerned with a real-life murderer who killed and buried numerous women in and around his London house. The play, "in the Dracula tradition," is designed to stimulate the audience to question the fairness of the social system, to show the parallels between criminals and the police and to illustrate that even a perverted mass murderer is also a human being. Like so much of Brenton's work, it is frightening, amusing, tedious and thought-provoking.

Stephen Grecco, in a review of "The Romans in Britain" and "Plays for the Poor Theatre," in World Literature Today, Vol. 55, No. 4, Autumn. 1981, p. 673.

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