When the former Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi defected to the Reform party, he described the UK as diseased. “Our wonderful country is sick,” he said. “Britain needs Nigel Farage.” At a far-right rally last year, Elon Musk told supporters: “Violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” These sentiments are expressed, almost verbatim, in Bertolt Brecht’s exacting 1941 satire about the rise of Hitler, who frequently referred to Germany as diseased, in danger and in urgent need of protection.
In rehearsals for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s upcoming production of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the cast have been exploring the uncanny parallels between the blackly comic melodrama and current events in Britain and across the Atlantic. “It’s the same rhetoric,” says Mark Gatiss, who stars as Arturo Ui. “You just give it 80 years. The second world war generation has died out, so it’s fertile ground again. The same bullshit works. It’s really frightening.”
