In 1933, German playwright Bertolt Brecht fled Berlin, seeking to escape the ever tightening restrictions on freedom of speech. After pitstops in several countries, he wound up in the United States, only to find himself on trial in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a sinister warm up act for the McCarthy era, for suspected communist affiliations.

Four Walls And A Roof takes Brecht’s trial as a jumping off point to explore art, freedom of speech, and censorship. Creators and performers Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué also explore their own emigration from Beirut to Berlin and wind up wondering whether things are so very different now. Brecht himself prepared a statement for the trial but wasn’t permitted to share it so the performance has been created around his written words.

Majdalanie and Mroué are compelling performers. This is a show characterised by silence and absence as much as by the words spoken. Brecht’s character is deliberately absent from the play – the transcript of his interrogator is shared but Mroué crumples up Brecht’s statement and tosses it to the floor in a brilliant evocation of the disinterested committee’s witch-hunt.

Captions, quotations and photographs are projected onto a back cloth but the production is otherwise simply staged with two small tables, interrogation lamps, a microphone and the grand piano, looming in the background like a silent reproach. Interspersing the storytelling, Henrik Kairies performs a series of songs written by Hanns Eisler, an artist who collaborated with Brecht throughout their lives, accompanying himself on a grand piano. Eisler also wound up being summoned to appear in front of HUAC.

This is a dense show that calls for careful attention. Majdalanie and Mroué are interested in the parallels between a trial and theatre and the resulting production feels – fittingly – perfectly Brechtian. Brecht’s commitment to dialectical theatre is given free rein which is theatrically exciting but makes for a weighty tome of a play, in stark contrast to the dramatic thrills and spills of Christiane Jahaty’s A Trial earlier in this EIF. This in no way lessens the impact of the final sucker punch when the script winds round to powerful contemporary parallels but the audience will have worked rather harder to get there than some of them might like.

Four Walls and a Roof is at Festival Theatre Studio until Mon 17 Aug 2026