David Olusoga presented his new live show, A Gun Through Time for only the fourth time tonight. Known for the hit BBC series A House Through Time (a season of which was filmed in Liverpool) and his recent appearance on Celebrity Traitors, Olusoga brought his trademark blend of erudition, empathy and charm to one of the most provocative subjects in our history, the gun.
Far from a straightforward history lecture, A Gun Through Time is a visually ambitious and intellectually layered performance. The stage itself sets the tone; four deactivated guns (the Brown Bess musket, the Lee–Enfield rifle, the Thompson submachine gun and the Maxim gun) rest against a sleek, modern backdrop that projected historic photographs, charts, and interactive polls. The contrast between antique artefacts and digital media underlines Olusoga’s central thesis: that the past is inseparable from the present, and that the gun remains both a relic and a symbol of modernity. This was a theme he would return to.
Olusoga opened by inviting the audience to consider their own relationship with firearms, noting how unusual Britain is in its detachment from them. The audience is invited to vote via an app called Slido and can see the results compiled on screen in real time. Charts reveal that 42% of American households own a gun, while 71 million civilians in India possess firearms. By contrast, a live poll shows that only a third of the audience had ever handled one. “We are,” Olusoga observes, “historically unusual and fortunate.” Yet he warns that this detachment may not last, suggesting that we are “coming to the end of a bizarre and aberrant historical period” — a time of relative peace, sustained by the shadow of nuclear deterrence.
From there, Olusoga traces the evolution of weaponry through the four guns on stage. The Brown Bess musket, Britain’s standard firearm for over a century, evokes the empire’s far-reaching conquests, its image accompanied by a projected list of wars and uprisings it helped define. Whilst Olusoga was demonstrating how it worked, two sound effect shots were fired, much to the shock and amusement of the audience. The Lee–Enfield rifle and Thompson submachine gun mark the industrialisation of war, their mass manufacture blurring lines between killing, commerce and social change. Olusoga deftly links the rise of munitions work with the mobilisation of women, describing their political awakening as “inevitable” after the First World War. The Thompson, he notes, also transformed the gun into a cultural symbol, glamorised by Hollywood movies and gangster folklore.
After the interval, attention turns to the Maxim gun, or “Devil’s Paintbrush”, the first fully automatic machine gun. Its invention ended the cavalry age and ushered in mechanised slaughter. Yet astonishingly, Olusoga tells us it remains in use today in Ukraine, where it has proved to be extremely effective against Russian drones. “A high-tech modern form of warfare,” he remarks, “is being countered with a weapon invented when Queen Victoria was on the throne.”
In closing, Olusoga reflects on Britain’s “post-war complacency”, urging his audience to confront how fragile our detachment from violence really is. A Gun Through Time transforms instruments of death into prompts for self-examination, asking: “Is our luck about to run out?” Only time will tell.
A Gun Through Time continues into 2026 and tickets are available here,
https://www.fane.co.uk/david-olusoga#event-listing
Reviewer – Adrian Cork
On – 7.11.2025
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