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Bertolt Brecht termed it “cold execution”. He was thinking of the way the US government, in the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac), could murder its opponents not by directly killing them but by cutting them off from what kept them alive. Where the cold war was waged without bullets, these cold executions were enacted, for example, on any blacklisted artist who could no longer work in Hollywood.

It is an idea picked up by Lebanese artists Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué who use the story of the playwright in exile as a way of thinking about displacement in our own era. Brecht, no doubt seeing the writing on the wall, got out of his native Germany soon after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. It took him several countries, eight years and a journey across land and sea to reach the US. As Majdalanie and Mroué wryly point out, getting back to Europe after the US questioned his communist affiliations took only a day.

In an absorbing illustrated lecture, accompanied by pianist Henrik Kairies singing songs by Brecht and Hanns Eisler, the pair use the playwright’s life away from home as a way of asking questions about place and identity. As émigrés from Beirut to Berlin, they have a personal interest in the idea of homeland: however you define it, it means more than the four walls and a roof of the title.

Reading from their script in a casual, un-actorly way, they gently prod Brecht’s story towards today. The Huac wanted yes-or-no certainty and did not allow the playwright to read his prepared statement. Had they heard his commentary on the early Nazi crackdown on free speech perhaps they would have spotted parallels with their own intolerance. With the far right on the rise again, they are parallels that speak to us ever more pointedly.