24.07.2025

Learning to play our way

An opportunity for all to take an active role and be part of a unique audience for political learning. Tam Dean Burn looks forward to the cultural programme at CU 2025

In the late 1930s, whilst in exile from Nazism, the German communist writer and theatre-maker, Bertolt Brecht, and his close comrade, Walter Benjamin, attempted to create an international collective of radical artists, writers and intellectuals. They wanted such a collaboration to produce politically engaged, experimental and socially critical work in opposition to the rising fascist aesthetics and capitalist cultural production.

They took inspiration from Denis Diderot, the 18th century French writer and philosopher, and his editorship of the Encyclopédie - a sort of Wikipedia of the day, but with the point being to change the world, not just understand it. Diderot saw this as a collective means to democratise knowledge and challenge authoritarian structures.

In honour, Brecht and Benjamin named their enterprise the Diderot Gesellschaft (‘society’) and put a great deal of theoretical work into it - some of which still awaits translation into English. Unfortunately, however, because of the conditions of exile and the outbreak of war they did not manage to create such a gathering and Benjamin died tragically in 1940 - committing suicide on the France-Spain border when he thought he was about to fall into fascist hands and all that would entail for a renowned communist cultural figure such as himself.

Brecht’s post-war Berliner Ensemble in the German Democratic Republic gave him and his comrades the means to explore in practice a lot of what he and Benjamin had theorised, but, of course, it was impossible to collectivise this internationally due to the cold war and bureaucratic-socialist censorship.

In 1970 a group of cultural academics, mainly based in the United States, formed the International Brecht Society and went on to produce a range of symposia and yearbooks on many aspects of Brecht’s work. These gatherings of academics and theatre-makers laid claim to the mantle of the Diderot Gesellschaft and explored many of its resonances over the next 50 years or so.

But in 2022 a major rift developed in the IBS, after it was announced that the first symposium following the Covid lockdown would take place in Tel Aviv University and be organised by Israeli academics. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and many Palestinian theatre companies sent IBS an open letter demanding the symposium be moved from Tel Aviv.¹ Scores of IBS members did likewise.

But the symposium did go ahead, and so many members resigned: the IBS had taken sides with apartheid and ethnic cleansing, forfeiting any right to claim the inheritance of Bertolt Brecht and the Diderot Gesellschaft. The issue of Israel/Palestine proved yet again to be the acid test for connivance, collusion and complicity with imperialism - the IBS failed that test and has made no attempt since to recover its credibility.

Today, just like the burning need for a mass Communist Party operating on an international scale, a genuinely radical, interdisciplinary, artistic exchange such as the Diderot Gesellschaft is ever more vital to resist today’s rising fascist aesthetics and to create alternatives to capitalist cultural production (whether state-funded or not) - and Communist University offers a great opportunity to start an exploration towards forging such a united cultural front.

The evening CU cultural programme comes under the banner, ‘Learning Play’, inspired by Brecht’s radical and experimental modernist theatre, the Lehrstücke - or, as he himself preferred, the English translation, ‘learning plays’, which showed that the pedagogy involved came from all those participating, not just from some teacher or leader on high.

CU offers the opportunity for all attending to take an active role and be part of a unique audience for political learning and tools for change. Each evening a new potential production will be seeded, starting with Brecht’s poeticisation of the Communist manifesto, translated and adapted by the eminent Marxist professor, Darko Suvin. As comrade Suvin says in his accompanying essay to the poem, “it constitutes an updating for the age in which the bourgeoisie reaches for world wars in response to economic crises of its system”.²

When I told him of the plan to follow his and Brecht’s hopes for it to be read aloud (that will happen in sections every day at CU), he replied: “I do believe Brecht is probably the main single body of work we have to ferry over into this dark age for help. To begin each day of your summer enterprise with a reading from the manifesto is a wonderful idea.”

Another related issue to the IBS scandal was the discovery - by some of the very academics who organised the Israeli symposium - that Brecht’s play, The exception and the rule, had its world premiere in a kibbutz near Haifa in 1938. The ramifications of this - even more obviously in the harsh genocidal light of today - are wide-ranging and I asked Esther Leslie, professor of political aesthetics at Birkbeck University, if she would be interested in exploring this. I have long admired comrade Leslie’s deep knowledge of that era - particularly her invaluable work and militant stance on Benjamin and Brecht. She has become central to the planning and hopes for ‘Learning Play’. The exception and the rule is one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke and we will begin work on that on the second night of CU, exploring a new translation that comrade Leslie is working on.

A vital aspect of Walter Benjamin’s work, much researched by Leslie, is his ‘Angel of history’ - featured in the ninth of his theses on the Concept of history. It was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting, ‘Angelus Novus’, which Benjamin describes as looking as though …

he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress is this storm.³

This feels ripe for performance and will be the focus of the ‘Learning Play’ session on Saturday August 3. We will collage it with another theatricalised avenging angel, ‘Divine Correction’, whom I played in David Lyndsay’s 15th century epic Scots play, Ane satyre of the Thrie Estaites⁴ and the angelic musical presence in the Nectarine No9 album, Saint Jack.⁵

Next up will be the author of this letter of complaint, laying out why that IBS Tel Aviv symposium should have been cancelled:

Don’t take part in this Brecht-washing of racism, oppression, inequality, injustice and deprivation of the freedom of speech. In present-day Israel, those who protest oppression are shot. Those who resist military occupation are shot. Even those who don’t resist are abused, humiliated, beaten, kidnapped, tortured, killed, their bodies then confiscated; their land is stolen, their water is stolen, their heritage is bombed - they are Palestinians. The CfP [Call for Papers] does not mention them even once. The CfP does not contain the word, ‘Palestinian’. Please don’t take part in a conference on oppression where the oppressed have already been erased.

The letter came from Norwegian playwright Finn Iunker, who authored a play entitled Voices from Israel, based on verbatim statements by Israel Defence Forces soldiers. He has also written extensively on Brecht and Benjamin, and we are delighted he will be joining us at ‘Learning Play’. We will have a reading of his Play alter native - written in English for children and once described as “Brecht without Brecht”. I am indebted to comrade Iunker for introducing me to Brecht’s Diderot Gesellschaft and he too is keen to begin exploring the possibilities for such a gathering of radical art forces now.

I have been to many Zoom meetings of the Radical Anthropology Group and was very soon in awe of their deep understanding of original communism and how we became human. It should be noted that the CPGB stands pretty much alone on the left in understanding the importance of RAG’s work - Chris Knight has been a regular presenter at CU. I have had several discussions with Chris and Camilla Power on how to develop cultural work together, and now we will get that ball rolling with a ‘Learning Play’ session on how to make radical pantomime. We will be looking at the very ancient roots of that theatrical form with particular focus on the ‘Jack and the beanstalk’ story and touching on other such attempts as the radical 7:84 Theatre Company’s production, Trembling giant, and the ‘Jack’ stories in Scottish traveller tales.

I am also delighted that a working relationship with the eminent climate scientist and activist, Bill McGuire, will begin at ‘Learning Play’. Bill has long been using cultural means to get his stark, crucial messages across about the impending climate catastrophe and what needs to be done about it. Alongside books like Hothouse earth, he has written Skyseed, a novel about the dangers of geo-engineering climate ‘solutions’, and several short stories, as well as sketches performed with comedians. We will be exploring these on August 6, when Bill will also give a daytime power point presentation in the main CU programme.

So, all in all, a packed programme, part of the full timetable reproduced below. All this will hopefully offer much stimulation and seize the opportunity to begin forging a much needed radical international cultural front.