Debate offers not only an argument for, well, argument, but also the revelation, to me, of a sympathetic venue in the middle of London. Stone Nest, originally a Welsh Presbyterian church can bring its audience close up to the action, encircling it as if they are indeed about to vote.
As if responding to James Graham’s galvanising Best of Enemies, which dramatised the television wrangle between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, and to which James Baldwin crucially contributed, Debate stages the 1965 Cambridge Union tussle between Baldwin and Buckley. The motion, supported by Baldwin, was that “the American dream has been achieved at the expense of the American negro”.
