We invited Gabriele Uboldi (he/they) to provide an insight into the theatrical style deployed in Lessons On Revolution. Uboldi is an award-winning, queer non-binary, migrant multidisciplinary artist working across theatre, audio, opera and curation, whose work focuses on queerness, site-specificity, psychogeography, documentary theatre, archival research and community-building. They head Undone Theatre, a company working at the intersection of formal experimentation and platforming marginalised voices. Uboldi is currently a Barbican Young Changemaker and a Producer at Jermyn Street Theatre who has worked with the Young Vic, the Bridge Theatre, Summerhall and Soho Theatre. They trained on RADA and Birkbeck’s MA Text and Performance (2021) after obtaining a degree in Social Anthropology.
Here's what he has to say:
Every time I begin working on a new theatre piece, I always go back to a provocation raised by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble. In her book, which explores fiction writing as a political project, Haraway urges readers and writers alike to remember what stories tell other stories, what ideas think other ideas. Her argument is that stories do not exist in a vacuum—rather, narratives are shaped by the historical and social contexts they are told in. In a way, social and historical contexts are narratives in and of themselves.
Going back to Haraway’s words at the start of a writing project reminds me that storytelling is not a neutral act. Her work prompts me to think about not only what I write, but also how I write it. It helps me to think deeply about form as well as content, and how the two aspects may reinforce or contrast each other. This focus on the political potential of form is at the core of my practice and for the past few years, I have been experimenting with different ways of shifting the focus from the content of a story towards the rules of storytelling themselves. Can a story be the subject of another story?
Through my company Undone Theatre, I began exploring ways of deconstructing a story (or undoing it, if you will) just as the narrative is being pieced together. The theatrical form that allows me to achieve this is metatheatre. If you see an Undone Theatre show, you will most likely be invited on a journey to two parallel narrative levels. Which is to say: you’ll see a show about a show; both a story in a traditional sense and one which is precisely about testing the very rules in which the story exists. I hope this kind of work can raise questions such as: Who is writing the play and who is being told? How is the story being constructed, and what is being edited out? Who has the right to tell this story?
An example of this is Lessons On Revolution, co-written by Samuel Rees and me, which will be heading to Summerhall for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Lessons On Revolution is about the 1968 student protests in London and across the globe. But it’s also the true story of how Sam and I lived together in a mouldy and mice-infested Camden flat. There, we began researching the radical ideas of 1968, which inspired us to grapple with the problems that we faced at the time, and still face today—the mould and the mice, and the housing crisis at large; our hopes as artists against a collapsing theatre landscape.
Lessons On Revolution takes you on our journey of research into 1968. It stages the process of piecing a story together from a number of historical documents and events. It’s not an objective, authoritative history of student protests in the late Sixties. Rather, the show puts the biases and interests that Sam and I have at centre stage, and it asks that you consider how they shape the story we are sharing with you. It features, for example, my personal history of migration to the UK and my queerness. By juxtaposing these autobiographical notes with historical, archival material, we spark a metacommentary on why the show is shaped the way it is, how our histories inform it and what we are hoping to achieve from staging this material today.
In Lessons On Revolution, Sam and I ask the audience to help us tell the story. We intentionally undermine our own authority and show all the dead ends, the non-sequiturs and the struggle of telling a story. There is perhaps a nicely tied conclusion to be written about why the failure of storytelling feels like a timely narrative framework for the world we live in today. But for now, I shall leave this text unfinished—I’ll leave this metaliterary ending for another piece, perhaps, on this piece, about a show within a show...
