Charleston Festival - Sunday

In 1931 the League of Nations, attempting to encourage great thinkers to encourage pacifism, commissioned a correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the subject ‘Why War?’ The correspondence, which you can read here was published in Britain in Germany in 1933, but perhaps because Hitler had already come to power, only 4,000 pamphlets were published and the exchange never became as well known as it might have. Tonight, in a premiere dramatised reading, actors Henry Goodman and David (Four Weddings) Haig act out this meeting of the two greatest minds of the twentieth century. The reading is preceded by another piece of work celebrating the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth, a play called Sweet Dreams, based on Freud’s case study of Dora and set in Vienna in 1900. Written by Diane Esguerra, it is presented by the Sphinx Theatre Company and stars Anton Lesser and Ann Marcuson.

This Gala Evening, entitled Freudian Slips, is preceded at 5pm by a talk by two writers influenced by the father of psychotherapy, Lisa Appignanesi, author of the psychological thriller Sanctuary and Frank Tallis, author of Vienna Blood, a detective story with a Freudian bent. The first talk of the day, at 2pm, is by the literary travel writer Christopher Ondaatje, who, together with Bloomsbury analyst Barbara Caine looks at the colonial influences of the Bloomsbury set. Ondaatje’s latest book, Woolf in Ceylon, tracks Leonard Woolf’s life journey from colonial civil servant to anti-imperial activist.