Tell Me Lies

Theatre legend Peter Brooks’s 1968 film, ‘Tell Me Lies’, based on the anti-Vietnam war protest play ‘US’ he staged with the RSC in 1966, has been missing, presumed lost, for years. A new copy has emerged and been restored. It’s a startling work, born of an extraordinary time. It describes itself as a ‘semi-documentary’, although that doesn’t do justice to its rapid-fire mix of dramatic reconstruction, agitprop songs, news footage and sense of personal and political enquiry. It feels strikingly immediate.