There can’t be many plays in which the emotional turning point is an argument over Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament. But then there can’t be many plays inspired by a Romans-in-Britain travelogue by the Guardian’s chief culture writer.
Unlikely though it might seem, David Greig’s two-hander is a free adaptation of the 2013 book by Charlotte Higgins in which the journalist visits sites of Roman occupation, ranging from vague undulations in farmers’ fields to mighty defences still standing after two millennia. Higgins contends that these islands can only have been shaped by a regime that lasted 400 years – as long from today as the age of Shakespeare – and yet we have little cultural understanding of what the influence was. [READ MORE]