Romans in the Gloamin'

By JAY COCKS

Profane Celts cause scandal on the Thames

Thievery! Strange rites of initiation! Beatings! Class warfare!

This is not a coming attraction for a documentary account of a week in a British public school. It is, rather, a rough synopsis of a lively and incautious new play, The Romans in Britain, whose combination of ancient history, contemporary politics and ageless human indulgence has created Britain's biggest theatrical controversy in a decade. Howard Brenton's below-the-belt pageant, written with profane wit and political passion, is presented under the high-flown auspices of the National Theater, which has been threatened in the ensuing dustup with various reprisals, including the withdrawal of government endowment that totals over $1.5 million.

The Romans is overwhehningly--perhaps recklessly--ambitious, an attempt to correlate the twilight of early British history with some of the nation's bedrock myths and most urgent contemporary problems. Celtic lore and Roman might thus flow through the first stirrings of Arthurian legend and course straight into the Irish issue. A quarter of the play takes place in 1980, when a British spy waits in a field to eliminate a high-ranking member of the I.R.A. "It's Celts we're fighting in Ireland," he ruminates. "We won't get anywhere till we know what that means."

Brenton's game attempts to show just what that does mean have been scorned for political superficiality and shortsightedness. But Brenton's presentation is not meant to hold up in Parliament; it is a metaphorical point whose truth is poetic. The ruckus has little to do with such niceties of debate, however. It centers on the generous amounts of sex and violence with which The Romans was staged. Bad enough, for fainthearts in the audience, that the first act contains a lynching, a throat cutting and assorted acts of bloody roughhouse. It also features three Celts bounding around the vast stage of the Olivier Theater in nothing but their birthday suits and some anachronistic Rod Stewart haircuts. Frontal nudity in the National Theater is like a flasher in a cathedral. Worse follows: the slaughter of two of the Celts by a squad of Roman invaders and the sodomizing of a third. This sight encouraged the leader of the Greater London Council, Sir Horace Cutler, to send down telegraphic thunderbolts about the renewal of the National's subsidy. Censor-without-Portfolio Mary Whitehouse read about--but did not see--The Romans, and immediately swore out a complaint. Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad was sent to investigate. The battle was joined.

James Fenton, drama critic of the Sunday Times, called the play "a nauseating load of rubbish," and yearned for the resignation of National Theater Director Peter Hall, who steadfastly stood by Brenton and the production. Playwright Edward Bond weighed in with a defense so oblique that he never mentioned the play by name. He did, however, call for the resignation of Fenton, while John Osborne, who has had his own wrangles with the censor, addressed a sally to the Guardian: "Sir--I don't go to the theater to see a lot of buggery. We get quite enough of that at home."

The box office has certainly been done no damage, and the National seems to have escaped the wrath of the Greater London Council. The grant is intact, the public is intrigued, and Scotland Yard is in grateful retreat. Still, if the fight has simmered down, the heat of the debate lingers. Correspondence and controversy continue, and the letters--diverse as they may be--all share a particular passion, not only for points of conscience and politics but for theater. They are like one of Brenton's Romans, who starts to address Julius Caesar, "I speak from the heart . . ." "A disgusting, fashionable habit," Caesar reminds him, an aside bound to cut any passionate British theatergoer right to the quick.

--By Jay Cocks

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