Current Events

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire (1921) and the 60th Anniversary of the James Baldwin and William Buckley debate at the Cambridge Union (1965) Undiscovered Country, in partnership with AlterEgo Creative Solutions and the Cambridge Union, are launching an applied theatre schools tour exploring the relationship between the 'oppressor' and the 'oppressed'.

Tuesday 12th July

7.00 pm (doors open at 6.30 pm) 

University of Northampton, 

Waterside Campus, Creative Hub, 

University Dr, Northampton NN1 5PH 

This event will be for peace scholars, educators, young people (15+) and the general public. Whilst the racist and violent language has been removed for the Schools Tour the events on the 12th and 13th July will be a verbatim reenactment of the original debate. People who may be offended by this should not attend. 

The actor/writers, Roy Leighton (the co-chair of the Cambridge Peace and Education Research Group) and Craig Green (an attorney from the United States) will facilitate this public debate. Craig and Roy trained and worked as professional actors and writers before moving into their respective educational, commercial and legal fields. Both have a shared passion for social justice.

Roy is the co-author of ‘101 Days To Make A Change’ and ‘The Working Class’ and holds a Masters Degree in Philosophy in ‘Knowledge, Power and Politics’ from Cambridge University. Craig is an activist for social change and focuses on criminal work in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Craig and Roy first met in the summer of 1987 in the mountains of North Japan. These two young actors had travelled from their respective countries (the U.K. and the U.S.A.) to study physical theatre with Japanese theatre director Tadashi Suzuki in his remote training centre in Toyama prefecture. 

Over the past 35 years, Roy and Craig have looked for an opportunity to work together on the right project. The catalyst for their collaboration, ‘The Fire In Cambridge’, was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Brazilian Educator and Philosopher Paulo Friere and the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. Craig was a member of the district attorney's staff working on the George Floyd trial. This shocking case highlighted the violence and racism that is still very much part of American and UK culture. As part of his Masters in Philosophy Degree at Cambridge (Knowledge, power and politics in 2020/21) Roy had written an essay, in the form of a radio drama, between black, gay civil rights activist James Baldwin and white, working-class educational activist Diane Reay. This is available to hear on the ‘Knowledge, Power and Politics’ website. 

These various interwoven strands drew them to the Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1965. Though the debate was almost 60 years ago, the motion for debate: The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro, seemed just as relevant now as it was in 1965.

The reenactment of this debate in Cambridge on 13 July provides an insight into Baldwin, who wrote about race issues facing America, and Buckley, an outspoken conservative with a very different view. Roy and Craig hope that by recreating the debate it will open up a new discussion on race and the importance of dialogue in a world that is dominated by self-obsessed, opinionated and confrontational debate.