Abstract
There was controversy in 1980 when Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain opened at the National Theatre. Set in 54 BC, during Julius Caesar’s invasion, and in AD 515, when Anglo-Saxon settlers were displacing the Romanized Britons, the play is punctuated by contemporary scenes — calculated to provoke — that show the British Army in action in Northern Ireland. Brenton does not shrink from displaying the brutality of an archaic society. His play starts with a group of ancient Britons killing an outlaw and abusing a slave. But the Romans, despite their developed social order and technology, are as brutal as those they attack. In a scene that prompted Mrs Whitehouse to take the play’s director to court, three Roman soldiers, separated from their unit, murder two British ‘wogs’ and rape a third after slashing him about the buttocks with a knife.1
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