Acclaimed theatre director and former RSC director Peter Brook returns to Stratford and the theatre company he helped to create, with an event looking at the Theatre of Protest movement.

Theatre of Protest: Politics On Stage - The Swan Theatre on Saturday 5 November, 10am.

Peter Brook will be joined by a panel of theatre makers and political commentators including David Edgar, Celia  Mitchell and Mojisola Adebayo (director and creator of 48 Minutes for Palestine (2011), a play which grew out of twelve years project work with Ashtar Theatre and focuses on the lives of those in occupied Palestinian territories).The panel will look at the role theatre has to play in today’s political and social landscape.

This event is preceded by a screening of Tell Me Lies, the film based on thecontroversial RSC production US (directed by Peter Brook in 1966 ) on Friday 4 November in The Swan Theatre. This production caused a firestorm in the media when it was first seen in 1966. A team of actors, including Michael Williams, Clifford Rose and Glenda Jackson, joined three writers, Peter Brook, and designer Sally Jacobs to create a provocative expose of what was happening in the Vietnam war. The play was devised in anarchic fashion over six weeks at the Aldwych Theatre. This rare screening of the production captured the imagination and wrath of the British Establishment.

Maydays, by David Edgar - Saturday 5 November, 2pm

Polly Findlay directs a script-in-hand performance of David Edgar’s iconic play written for the RSC in 1983 and premiered at the Barbican just after Margaret Thatcher’s re-election. The play is an epic study of political commitment and betrayal between the 40s and the 80s, interweaving the stories of a British working-class communist, a student revolutionary and a Soviet army officer.

For further information, please contact philippa.harland@rsc.org.uk