Romans

Alice Birch is one of Europe’s premier playwrights and her writing for TV includes “Succession” and “Dead Ringers”. Now she has written nothing less than an epic portrait of the pitfalls of male rule in the modern era that is both highly entertaining and deeply shocking. It begins sometime in the nineteenth century. The three brothers Jack, Marlow and Edmund Roman grow up with their father after their mother dies giving birth to the youngest. At boarding school all three encounter the brutal educational methods of the “bourgeois century” while the wars of the age rumble in the background. After this shared trauma, Alice Birch dispatches the three men on an epic journey through life’s ups and downs. Jack seeks self-validation as a soldier and then becomes a famous writer. Marlow, the most unscrupulous, becomes one of the richest businessmen in the world. Edmund is unsuccessful, finds himself suspected of murder and remains dependent on his two brothers for the rest of his life. They leave behind them an increasing number of failed relationships with women as they desperately attempt to fill their inner emptiness. Alice Birch’s family saga blows apart all conventional sense of time, spanning an arc through the disasters of the 20th century to the present, where the brothers find themselves confronted by a new generation of defiant women. The play is directed by Sebastian Nübling, who made his name as a specialist in directing contemporary texts.