The Almeida Theatre has released the fifth instalment in the second series of digital film project Figures Of Speech, with Russell Tovey performing American aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 1941 The War Agitators speech.
Lindbergh’s speech advocating US non-intervention in World War Two led to the coining of the term “America First’ and received condemnation for its allegedly anti-Semitic content.
The series concludes on Monday 23 October with a collection of films written and performed by group of Young Leaders, aged between 15-25, tackling a diverse range of subjects including masculinity, cuts to the prison system, the representation of Latin Americans in British society and Islamophobia.
All the films can be watched for free on the Figures Of Speech website.
Series two of Figures of Speech has previously featured Cush Jumbo delivering Malcolm X’s ‘The Language of Violence’, Derek Jacobi reading Socrates’ ‘I Go To Die’, Noma Dumezweni performing Margaret Sanger’s ‘The Morality of Birth Control’ and John Heffernan with Harold Macmillan’s ‘The Winds of Change’. The films examine what leadership means and the power of the spoken word in the 21st century with a focus on rhetoric that initially received a hostile reaction and remains both divisive and provocative.
Figures of Speech is conceived by Rupert Goold and directed by Anthony Almeida. It is the Almeida’s third major digital theatre event, following day-long durational readings of The Iliad and The Odyssey in 2015, which inspired audiences of over 50,000 people across the UK and around the world.