Ever since Mary Whitehouse's ludicrous private prosecution 25 years ago, Howard Brenton's play has been virtually lost to the professional stage. And, even though it's a deeply flawed piece, at least Samuel West's Sheffield revival enables us to judge the play aesthetically rather than morally.
What caused the original row was a scene in which a young Druid priest is buggered by a Roman centurion in 54 BC. But Mrs Whitehouse's prurient preoccupation with simulated sodomy obscured the real point that Brenton was seeking to make: that the Roman occupation of Britain, with its brute force and contempt for the values of the colonised, was exactly mirrored by the British attitude to Ireland down the centuries.
And, lest we miss the point, in the second half Brenton has a modern British military assassin lying in a field near the Irish border and renouncing his blood-soaked imperial heritage at the cost of his own life.
For me the real problem with Brenton's play is not the violence: it is the way it substitutes images for argument and poetry for politics.
It is, for example, a clever theatrical coup to show the cool, calculating, diabolically heartless Caesar suddenly transformed into a jeep-driven modern British army officer; but it doesn't actually prove there is a direct historical parallel between Roman and British imperialism. Equally Brenton's gift for sharp, flinty, pungent language cannot disguise the lack of any serious debate. In the second half the beleaguered British officer talks of "the great wrong of England in Ireland"; it's a fine, resonant phrase but what is never clear is how he hopes, by a single self-sacrificial gesture, to reverse the tide of history.
For all its faults, Brenton's play is impeccably revived by West. Veteran designer Ralph Koltai has created a stunning image of a warped, gnarled, knotted tree-trunk above a standing pool and a rolling greensward.
And West brings out both the play's imagistic power and dark humour. Tom Mannion's Caesar, laconically wondering what he is doing in "a filthy backwater somewhere near the edge of the world", is filled with imperial lassitude. Guy Williams invests the British intelligence officer with the aristocratic despair of someone who sees the link between a Roman spear, a Saxon axe and a British machine-gun.
And Dan Stevens as the hapless Druid who gets raped by the Romans in the water suffers stoically.
But, although the play was attacked for its brutality, its real weakness is that it is suffused with a Utopianism and a hunger for an England that never was.
· Until February 25. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
