Lessons on revolution
1968, London School of Economics. Three thousand students occupy a lecture hall, demanding the university cut ties with apartheid-era Rhodesia. Tensions escalate as the students fight for radical change while the administration pushes back. The world watches, waiting to see who will blink first. 2024, a cramped Camden flat. Two flatmates dive into the archives from 1968, discovering the student movement that electrified their local streets fifty years earlier. When the rent on their unsafe flat goes up again, they turn to the past to reignite their belief in the future.
LSE Festival is proud to present Samuel Rees and Gabriele Uboldi’s play Lessons on Revolution which brings the most significant protest of a generation to life through the voices of those who lived it. One of the "most talked about shows from this year’s Edinburgh festivals" (The Conversation).
After the performance there will be a Q&A with writers and performers Sam Rees and Gabriele Uboldi, LSE Library archivist Lisa McQuillan, and Dr Wendy Willems, LSE Department of Media and Communications.
Lessons on Revolution is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Meet our speakers and chair
Lisa McQuillan has been working as an archivist for fifteen years starting out working for public broadcaster Channel 4, spending ten years working for Quakers in Britain, and starting at LSE in 2024, working on the University collections. Her interests include community archiving, hidden and contested histories, and pacifist and humanitarian archives.
Sam Rees is a playwright and theatre-maker. As co-founder of Carmen Collective, he has delivered acclaimed projects across the country to sell-out audiences. With a focus on tackling big ideas in intimate ways, Sam's work has been praised by critics as 'a space for radical conversation to happen'.
Gabriele Uboldi is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and producer. Their work focuses on the city and psychogeography, archives and memory, queerness and migration. They head their company Undone Theatre and have previously worked with the Barbican, the Young Vic, and Soho Theatre.
Wendy Willems is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her research addresses the silencing, erasure and sanitisation of histories of (anti)-colonialism, slavery and racialisation in a range of genres, including academic accounts, media discourses, urban space, disciplinary histories and institutional histories. One of her current projects situates the transnational communication strategies of ‘the London Recruits’ in the South African anti-apartheid struggle within the wider context of student activism between 1967-69.
Robtel Neajai Paileyis Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Policy at LSE. A Liberian scholar-activist working at the intersection of Critical African Studies, Critical Development Studies and Critical Race Studies, she is author of the award-winning monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
More about this event
This event is part of the LSE Festival: Visions for the Future running from Monday 16 to Saturday 21 June 2025, with a series of events exploring the threats and opportunities of the near and distant future, and what a better world could look like. Booking for all Festival events will open on Monday 19 May.
LSE Library was established in 1896 as The British Library of Political Science with a Trust Deed stating its purpose as: "promoting the study and general knowledge of … all matters relating to the progress and development of communities and of mankind generally"
Read more about the project at Lessons on Revolution: making theatre in the archives.
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