Lessons on Revolution | Jermyn Street Theatre

Documentary theatre is not a common label in the theatre world, but it is entirely fitting for Carmen Collective and Undone Theatre’s Lessons on Revolution, currently playing at Jermyn Street Theatre.

Written and performed by Samuel Rees and Gabriele Uboldi, Lessons on Revolution is part lecture, part manifesto, and part commentary on the act of writing itself. It follows the pair’s research into the 1968 LSE student protest against the university’s connections with apartheid-era Rhodesia, with sweeping connections to protest and power across the 1960s and the modern day. 

The show moves between the students’ cramped London flat and the Old Theatre at LSE, where the 1968 protest took place. Given the small stage and Ella Dale’s minimalistic set design, the piece relies on changes in lighting (Laurel Marks) and signalling from the script itself to make these transitions, but Rees and Uboldi’s writing is sufficiently atmospheric to make this work.

Dale’s set conjures up the students’ living room with a few simple pieces, a table and chairs and a gramophone (used by the performers to suggest that Rudy Percival’s sound design is in fact diegetic sound), while protest posters signal the wider themes of the piece. An old-fashioned overhead projector is used to project images onto the back wall, adding to the lecture-like feel of the piece and helping the audience to digest the sometimes considerable volume of information which Rees and Uboldi give them to absorb.

Audience members are also called on frequently throughout the evening to perform supporting roles, reading lines of dialogue provided to them by the performers. This largely works well, although a late scene where future versions of Rees and Uboldi read letters to each other might have been better taken on by the writers themselves.

A consistent theme of the piece is failure, with the performers warning the audience early on that the 1968 protest did not achieve its goals, a fact that is true of numerous other protests referenced throughout the 60-minute runtime.

“You know that feeling, about how awful things will always stay the same?” Uboldi says as they deliver this information, and this bleak sentiment is repeated a number of times, as the pair grapple with the failures of the protestors who they are researching and with the issues facing them in the modern day, from their struggles to write consistently and well to their worries that their shoddy HMO may burn down while they sleep.

And yet, Lessons on Revolution manages to end on a hopeful note, a call to action. “We’re doomed until we’re not,” an audience member reminds us, reading Rees’ words. “Another ending is possible.”

Lessons on Revolution could give some audience members the fire to help write that ending, and that is more than can be said for a lot of theatre.

Informative, urgent and inspiring, Lessons on Revolution will give audiences plenty to think about and may even call them to action.

Lessons on Revolution runs at Jermyn Street Theatre until 03rd May 2025. 

Tickets and More Information

★★★★☆ (4*)

Gifted tickets in return for an honest review | Photography by Jack Sain