Adapter and Director: Christopher McElroen
In February 1965, the Cambridge Union, the university’s debating society, hosted a debate about the state of the United States of America, which was broadcast live by the BBC.
The attention was due to the Union having secured two famous Americans to contribute to the motion that “the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro”. Alongside students who would propose and oppose the motion, the Union presented novelist and civil rights campaigner James Baldwin, seconding the motion, and conservative commentator William F. Buckley.
Theatre company the american vicarious replicates the television portion of the debate, with two students setting out arguments for and against the motion before Baldwin and Buckley really get stuck into their own speeches. Footage from the US rebroadcast of the BBC’s output dovetails each of the four speakers, attempting to provide a semblance of what it must have been like to witness firsthand. In reality, a further six students spoke after their American guests had concluded, but their contributions are lost here – and it’s hard to imagine how they could have topped the two barnstorming speeches that form the bulk of this dramatised reconstruction.
Indeed, the opening volleys by the students (played by Christopher Wareham and Tom Kitely) feel like weak sauce, as two posh white Brits discuss US civil rights almost as an abstract entity rather than a daily struggle. Weeks prior to the debate taking place, Martin Luther King and many others had been jailed in Selma, Alabama, in protest at the denial of the vote. Just three days after the debate, Malcolm X was assassinated, followed by the murder of Baldwin’s friend Jimmie Lee Jackson a few days later. A few weeks later, eyes would return to Selma to see a peaceful march to the state capital brutally attacked by police.
And so the opening moments of Debate feel slight, not only because of the state of America at the time, but because of the state of America now. When Arnell Powell rises to portray James Baldwin, though, the whole tenor of the evening changes.
Baldwin’s speech has since become regarded as one of the finest of the civil rights era, although that is due in part to its having been recorded for posterity, while others have been lost to the wind. Powell brings a sense of calm defiance to Baldwin’s words, which speak of his own experience growing up Black in America, the country’s history of slavery and segregation, and how the overall economic success at the time would not have been achieved without the labour of Black people.
The prospect of someone belonging to a country yet being systematically rejected by it, of pledging allegiance to a flag that offers no allegiance in return, is a powerfully emotive vision of history. And that epitomises Baldwin’s speech, which retains its ability to compel listeners some 60 years later. One might argue that, as a speech intended to support the original motion, its powerful imagery and appeals to the heart leave little time for a true economic or structural justification for the statement. It remains, however, a moral indictment of a society that was founded upon a presumption that Black people were the property of white men.
In comparison, Buckley’s argument (presented by Eric T. Miller, who also played Buckley in this play’s 2023 London performance) goes almost the other way. Acknowledging the country’s past shameful history, he also attempts to frame the Black experience as not being as bad as it is made out to be. American Black people were materially better off than the majority of the rest of the world, he argues – eliding over how poorly they compared to white citizens of the same country. Some outliers – a statistic that 35 Black Americans are millionaires is repeated – are posited as proof that any wider hardship is a self-inflicted one.
Buckley also attempts to use Baldwin’s own writings against him, repeatedly returning to a passage from his work The Fire Next Time: “the only thing that the white man has that the Negro should want is his power.” Repeatedly framing it as a threat implies a zero-sum contest – if Black people gain power, then the white people must lose it, and that must be a bad thing. It’s an argument which was weak then and remains weak now, yet remains pervasive.
The format of two competing, pre-prepared and largely uninterrupted speeches (in reality, Buckley received many points of order, of which all but one are removed here) means that neither of the points made by the two principal orators is ever really checked. That may be accurate in terms of depiction of the original debate, but it also means that we end with Buckley’s paean to conservative white supremacy hanging in the air.
Still, one comes away believing, correctly, that Baldwin had the upper hand in this battle of minds. But in the six decades that have followed, it feels that it is Buckley’s side that has never lost the upper hand. The line from Selma, 1965, to Minnesota, 2026, is clearly demarcated. This record of a night at Cambridge University, however compelling, shows how it was little more than a brief pause along the way.
Runs until 7 February 2026
