Written by Suchita Thepkanjana
Photography by Jack Sain
Content Warning: This article mentions suicide
This article is predominantly a discussion with the writers/actors after the show at the Barbican in October 2025 and contains spoilers for the play ‘Lessons on Revolution’.
The date is 1968. The place is the Old Theatre, a dusty lecture hall at the heart of LSE’s campus. Inside are three thousand students, not watching a lecture or taking notes, but protesting against the School Director’s ties to apartheid.
This is how the play Lessons on Revolution by Gabriele Uboldi and Sam Rees begins. For the next hour, the two tell stories about this protest, but also about their own lives — growing up, keeping secrets from family, and battling eviction in a gentrifying London.
Weaving together seemingly unrelated fragments of history, Lessons on Revolution is ultimately an ode to the revolutionary spirit and a plea to keep it alive.
In the writers’ own words, “this story is about change and how we talk about it.”
LSE on Revolution
The date was 2023, and the place was the LSE Library. Gabriele and Sam had leafed through documents about LSE in 1968 for hours, gathering inspiration for their new play.
The two had conceived of this idea after reading about the student occupation of the Old Theatre in a history book, according to Sam.
“I was very interested in the idea of ‘68 as a moment […] and how it echoes and ripples”, he says.
Indeed, 1968 was a pivotal year in global and local history. Situated in the context of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and worldwide waves of decolonisation, LSE and its international ties became a centre for political tension and action. In this fateful year, Walter Adams, who financially supported minority rule and apartheid in Rhodesia, was appointed School Director. After several unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with Adams, activists David Adelstein and Marshall Bloom urged students to occupy the Old Theatre in protest.
“LSE was and is an immensely rich and well-resourced university in the most important city in the imperial core […] it’s only natural that the ramifications of empire would converge on it,” Sam describes. “LSE then becomes a place where a lot of these struggles come to bear.”
Gabriele adds: “We cared about LSE because it was just around the corner and because we’d just been students ourselves. I think that connection was really helpful in terms of how we got people engaged.”
Given this, they incorporated the archived pieces — black-and-white photographs, copies of the revolutionary pamphlet Agitator, letters from Walter Adams — throughout the play.
But the story does not end at this protest, this single moment in time. Gabriele and Sam emphasise that while anchored in a specific event, the play is not meant to be a perfect historical account. Rather, it is about what LSE in 1968 can teach us about struggle and the desire for change that continues across decades and circumstances.
“This documentary piece is, in many ways, the documentary of our lives as much as it is a piece about that period itself,” Sam explains.
Gabriele adds that the most important takeaway is “to understand yourself as part of a current struggle, but also as part of the continuation of what was going on in ‘68 and in all these different moments”.
At the core of this play and of revolution, no matter when or where it takes place, is the persistent determination that things always can and should change.
Revolution, Fifty-Six Years Later
The date was July 2024, and the place was the Marshall Building, where students had set up an encampment to protest the university’s complicity in arming Israel. LSE had just become the first university to evict its student encampment.
For current LSE students, Lessons on Revolution might feel eerily familiar. As Gabriele puts it, “What was happening back then is exactly what is happening right now.”
In both instances, there was a struggle and an attempt at revolution. But in both instances, revolution failed.
Walter Adams still became School Director, many student protestors of 1968 faced disciplinary measures, and Marshall Bloom committed suicide two years later. In the same way, the 2024 encampment was dismantled, and LSE has not divested.
Yet the most significant point is not that they failed, but that they were there in the first place.
Revolution is not solely characterised by dramatic, tangible policy change. Revolution is also, as Sam and Gabriele say in the play, “sitting in a room with 2999 other people, not doing anything, but existing politically, having a glimpse of a better future.”
“The success-or-failure binary is not useful,” Sam argues. “It sees history as an object that is finished.”
“There are ripples that come out of any particular activist movement […] Those ripples are still there.”
Lessons on Revolution is a story about history, politics, and failure. But above all, it is a story about hope. It is a story about remembering that change is always a real possibility. In the words of Gabriele and Sam,
“If things were different once, then they can be different again. It’s 1968 as long as we believe it is.”
LSE media relations have declined to comment on this article.
