REVIEW: Lessons on Revolution at The Hope Theatre 26 September – 7 October 2023

‘an interesting dramatic problem’ ★★★ ½

Samuel Rees and Gabriele Uboldi’s piece of documentary theatre is slickly produced, with help from a galloping sound design by Rudy Percival. Rees and Uboldi, playing themselves, claim not to be professional actors, and at times the piece they are in barely feels like a play – an impression reinforced by its academic-sounding title.

Somewhere between research presentation and conversation in a flat kitchen, the piece centres around an event in a theatre that is not actually a play: the events leading up to and following the 1967 occupation of a theatre by LSE students, in the course of which a porter had a heart attack and died. The hope and the tragedy inherent in this event, as well as the impossibility of knowing exactly what happened, form the complexity of problems at the heart of this piece.

The plurality in the title, “Lessons on Revolution,” hints at the fragmented nature of this piece, which rockets between the distant past (student protests at LSE in the 1960s), the near past (conversations between the two writers in their last flat, from which they have since been evicted for its poor fire safety), and the present, in which they attempt to conjure a space in which change can become possible within the confines of the aptly-named Hope Theatre. There are almost too many things going on, but the charismatic writer/performers manage to present this not as aimlessness but as an interesting dramatic problem: how to create theatre about real attempts to make the world better within a world that, evidently and distractingly, has not been improved by those attempts.

There is a lot to like here, and a lot to be frustrated by. An anecdote Rees and Uboldi tell, about their attempt to research the student protests which results in them almost misplacing an archival photograph might not be (as they present it) a universal symbol of the impossibility of accessing the past through theatre, so much as an instance of their struggles with one particular archive. But I admired the ambition in this piece, which aptly conjures up the frustrations inherent in being young, in a centre of power but relatively powerless, and desirous of change that feels impossible to imagine, let alone achieve.

Lessons on Revolution, The Hope Theatre, 26 September – 7 October 2023 https://www.thehopetheatre.com/productions/lessons-on-revolution/

Reviewer Clio Doyle is a playwright and university lecture