Revered for her work on Succession and Normal People, Alice Birch has now written an era-spanning play about men, novels and the manosphere. Give me a Brontë any day, she says
E
very word is a wrestling match for Alice Birch. “I find it quite painful,” the award-winning playwright and screenwriter admits. “It’s ugly and horrible. It’s not just pouring out of me. It feels, yeah …” She shrugs in the empty courtyard of London’s Somerset House. “… not very healthy or whatever.”
We meet early in the morning as Birch needs to race off to a secret project. She is a sought-after TV writer (on Succession and Normal People) but Birch’s blazing plays are known for their form and fury. Her brutal breakout in 2014, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, was written in a 72-hour whirl. She wrote her latest, Romans – now on at the Almeida – in around 10 days. “Of course I didn’t ‘write’ it in 10 days,” she clarifies. “I wrote it in eight years. It’s just that the words,” she waves the air around her head, “were up here.” She would love to squirrel away for a year working solely on one project. “But I guess life and kids and all the rest of it just never made that possible.”
Romans is a disruptive, expansive exploration of both masculinity and the novel over the last 150 years. The story centres on Jack, played by Kyle Soller, who we first meet as a 10-year-old boy. Each act of young Jack’s impossibly stretched life is framed by a different historical literary style: 19th-century novel, modernism, post-modernism. “The idea that it’s almost impossible,” Birch says, “is where it feels exciting.” Form, for her, always comes first. Following Jack and his brothers across time, this is Birch’s first play with a central narrator. “It can feel a bit old-fashioned,” she says, a phrase that will probably not feature in reviews of this play, “but a novel that’s interested in a man defining himself requires a man to stand on stage on his own and speak.”
