FringeReview UK 2025

Samuel Rees and Gabriele Uboldi Lessons on Revolution

Samuel Rees and Gabriele Uboldi, Undone Theatre and Carmen Collective

Genre: Contemporary, Cue Scripts, Drama, Experimental, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Interactive, Lecture, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre, Verbatim Theatre

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“It’s 1968 for as long as we say it is” announces co-writer and actor Samuel Rees, who with Gabriele Uboldi explores that era’s London School of Economics  protest, and how it impacts another, in 2024. All from their dangerous non-HMO Camden flat, that might flare up itself at any moment. The flatmates revive their Edinburgh Fringe five-star show Lessons on Revolution at Jermyn Street Theatre for a short run to May 3^rd, presented by Undone Theatre and Carmen Collective.

Far more than an illustrated lecture, though it’s presented that way, Rees and Uboldi unfold the lessons as both inspiring and cautionary. The 1968 and 2024 protests bring the intersectional through the interpersonal: empathising with two earlier activists. What can 1968 teach the 2024 pro-Palestine marchers? Be prepared to join in. It’s compulsory.

The co-creators narrate by referencing two students: David Adelstein, a South African president of the Students Union is mentioned very rarely. But Marshall Bloom, an American who filled the same post for Graduates and found being closeted traumatic, finds resonance with Uboldi. Audience members are picked out to enact roles and read off scripts. It’s good-humoured, interactive and enormous fun. The writer/actors shift from chatty to theatre and transform the moment. Position and manoeuvre. How Gramscian is that?

Similarly we’re not treated to ambient 1968. No “Marx, Mao, Marcuse”, and though there’s a whiff of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s “to choose always and choose always the same” this is a clean hour-long narrative, focusing on protest. Vietnam’s mentioned. It’s sleeked to minimum analogue reverb. No vinyl nostalgia, though some of that crackles in Rudy Percival’s sound design. And Laurel Marks yellows lighting with a 1968 lecture-hall glow.

The two 1968 students led a spontaneous 75%-supported protest amongst students and staff. We’re told how the appointment to the LSE of Walter Adams as Principal sparked a year of protests, and how Adams survived it. We’re told from the outset these demands fail: a post-Brechtian take on not setting up false expectations; then examining what worked.

Adams had been for 12 years Principal of the then University College of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), complaint with apartheid and racist laws, unleashing dogs and police on students, who arrested and deported Black students. Adams relocated as Rhodesia declared “independence” (UDI) from the mildly anti-racist Commonwealth and UK. The LSE was also heavily invested in by BP, which produced ingredients for Napalm bound for Vietnam; and whose senior members infested the LSE’s board.

Subsequent actions, arrests, negotiations, sit-ins, proximity of ITV and Fleet Street to loud demonstrations, all this meant maximum coverage, a lot of elusive documents.

Using slide projectors, simultaneously invoking their dodgy 2024 flat, the old LSE lecture hall (and library), Rees and Uboldi agree not every word of what follows is agreed either by them or other collaborators: but the conclusion is. What that conclusion is turns out both relevant and in a final gesture, theatrical.  The two are linked.

But it’s also personal. Adelstein seems not to have inspired a personal witness. Bloom is different. Again we’re told what happens to him. Here Uboldi laments not being able to tell his younger brother, also LSE-bound, that he’s loving queer London, let alone his Communist grandfather, shown on Ella Dale’s video design along with her lecture-hall tables and projections, a set of pseudo-cluttered deftness. The revolutionary grandfather who’s reverted (with his grandmother) to Catholic habits, despite keeping Communist memorabilia. Conflict is intersectional. There’s a placard of 1968 against the gerontocracy, but how negotiate that with some figures from 1968 in your own family who never heard of LSE’s Queer solidarity from 1970, which comes too late for some? Even 57 years later, can you speak “out” to your own family? There’s a lot of personal for Uboldi; it’s here a deeper, engaging strand seems over too quickly. It’s enough Uboldi has spoken to us.

Was 1968 for all its homophobia, a more liberal place? A pamphlet ‘1968 Today’ is handed out and is well-worth reading (there’s illuminating conversations between 1968 and 2024 radicals), but much is touched on. It’s 2025 that sees arrests, threats of deportation, interference in domestic politics from at least two foreign powers. Where Journalists like Asa Winstanley and Quakers are raided, their electronic equipment stolen forever as they’re arrested under the Terrorism Act. Or the Firearms Act enacted for… wearing a Palestinian flag sweater off an aircraft.

So what can the recently post-Rachman era teach this one?  As 2025 rolls back both political rights and legal (including housing) obligations to people, they’re inextricably bound. It’s possible to imagine Lessons on Revolution as a 90-minute straight-through, with voices in that pamphlet and more personal witness darkening this affable piece. The final melodramatic gesture shows they’re capable of crafting such moments that stick in the mind. Any addition naturally endangers overbalancing, muddying, diffusing. The creators’ caution is understandable. Yet there’s room to engross with greater theatricality.

It’s intersectional, it’s personal, it’s interactive: all great reasons to see this play: unless you’re a board member of BP, or the government. Maybe it’s a show that keeps moving so it can’t be closed down. Either way it’s thrilling enough to make you wave the fold-out puce poster at your nearest MP. And wait for them to cry havoc, and let slip the AI dogs of Blair.

Stage Manager Vivi Wei, BSL Interpreter Sumayya Si-Tayeb.

Published April 30, 2025April 30, 2025 by Simon Jenner