'All politics is theatre'

When Bertold Brecht fled Nazi Germany, the full horror of the regime had not yet come to light. 

But he’d seen enough to make him head for the border, breaking north to Scandinavia, where pogroms and marauding shock troops were not official policy of the ruling party. 

It was February 1933, and national elections had just handed a majority to the NSDP. As Germans headed to the polls, NSDP members menaced political opponents in the street. 

Spectacle

They were buoyant with success.

Five days prior, the Reichstag Fire Decree had suspended all civil liberties at the behest of chancellor Adolf Hitler, who had pinned the blame for recent unrest on leftwing agitators.

Brecht was something of a leftwing agitator himself, known for his biting satires of capitalism and authoritarianism. He packed a bag. That May, his books would be thrown onto the bonfires. 

From exile in 1941, he chronicled everything he’d seen. The fatal embrace of landowners, corporate power and jackbooted opportunists looking to line their pockets and advance their personal empires. 

The vanity of liberal elites either beguiled by, or spineless against, new frontiers of power. The warping of public institutions, the normalisation of violence. 

And the importance, in all this, of political spectacle.

Beast

The resulting play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, could not be staged at the time. Despite its typically Brechtian absurdist setting - in gangland Chicago of the 1930s, amongst warring cauliflower salesmen - the allegory of the Fuhrer was clear, as were those to his blood hungry colleagues Rohm, Goring and the like. 

Despite the rank and file stand-ins, and a plot pegged to key moments in the Nazi consolidation of power such as the Reichstag fire, the Night of the Long Knives, the play goes beyond the just so story. 

Stripping the play of context or bald specificity allows the storm to power of ur-villain Arturo to take on both a mythological and a materialist edge. 

Brecht, true to form, betrays a Marxist interest in the bones of history, in the raw musculature. 

Alienation offers us a medical model, something stripped back gruesomely the better to show us how it lives, how it feeds, how it gets up and begins to walk. 

Perhaps, therefore, it is of no surprise that, after its long-delayed debut in the 1950s, The Resistible Rise tends to get readapted and retooled to tackle whatever beast of authoritarianism is most recently slouching across the world stage. In 2026, we are not short of such monsters. 

Carnivalesque

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s audacious, compelling production amps up the campness and grotesquerie. 

Director Seán Linnen told The Ecologist that the question on their minds was, “how do we make [the play] alive and dangerous and pertinent for now?”

Mark Gatiss’ unctuous Ui gurns and schemes from his bathtub, accompanied by hypnotically rubbery, cavorting, clown-painted performances from his band of goons. 

LJ Parkinson as Givola and Mahwaan Rizwan’s grinning Giri are particular standouts, with Kadiff Kirwan and Janie Dee leavening it with earnestness - the former menacing, the latter in despair. 

A carnivalesque production can easily get thematically derailed by its own momentum, junking depth service of a good night out. 

Ridiculous

But this production impressively knows when and where to puncture the raucousness - particularly in one standout moment by Amanda Wilkin - and where to remind us that by applauding when we are instructed, revelling in the carnage, staying silent as an audience member must, we too are playing right into Ui’s hands. 

Violence creates legitimacy through spectacle: blowing up a building is more politically palatable when we can ooh and ahh about the pretty colours the embers make as they fall.  

“At the beginning of the play we get everyone to applaud," Linnen explained. 

"We introduce all the characters, and they come out, and everyone claps each character - even though everyone knows that they based on Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and Ernst Rohm, some of the most horrific criminals in history. 

"But the audience is just there clapping”. Applause matters - and that which seems silly or ridiculous might be no less powerful for it. In fact: “That’s when it becomes much more dangerous.”

Henchmen

Gatiss’ performance avoids the burlesque Trumpisms, tempting as they would be now a quirk of history has turned Brecht’s absurdism into prediction. 

A corrupt fascist-coorporate alliance on the East Coast of America you say? How very bizarre. 

Linnen said: “We been quite specific in not wanting to make it just about Trump - because there's plenty of other people in every corner of the globe that Arturo represents.

"It's a playbook that is repeatedly used across the world - because it works.” 

The play does dip a toe into the present by briefly recasting the henchmen as ICE agents - a move part of me wishes got left in the workshop stage.

Presented alone, it slightly takes the wind out of the structuralist ambitions of the play. Understandable perhaps, in service of an urgent comparison between these latest recruits and earlier evolutions of the universal goon. 

Washed-up

“All politics is theatrical,” said Linnen, pointing to the link between theatre and democracy, in both their Ancient Greek traditions.

"The deal was that you went to the theatre to go and watch stories about people whose lives you don't know and you don't understand, so that then you could make the best decision in everyone's interests when you vote.” 

Similarly, he explained that "the play digs into the theatre of creating a politician and creating a monster. 

“There's a scene in the play where Ui goes to meet a washed up actor to get this actor to teach him how to speak and walk and sit. And that's real. Hitler did that.”

Vengeance

These two reference points in mind, one can’t help but wonder about the uneven role of this imagined demos in the mind of the writer, whether the citizen of Athens or the crowd member baying at the rally. There is theatre, and then again there is theatre. 

The script is fascinatingly light on the ideological aspects of fascism, and the banal chauvinisms that helped buoy it to state power - focusing instead on the structural embrace of big business, brokered on the back of hard cash and honest firepower. 

This move serves in part to strengthen that Brechtian alienation, and in part to puncture the supposed heartfeltness of fascist propaganda that invites us to mistake it for a belief system like any other. 

In doing so, we would be making the same mistake as the play’s quivering Hindenburg stand-in: treating fascism unseriously, like a dog easily leashed - or worse, welcoming it as an ally. 

Ignore the forever malleable promises of renewal, dignity, vengeance, offered by any would-be tyrant - and focus instead on the gun and the jackboot. 

Discomfort

The ideology of the jackboot is the stamping, the ideology of the gun is having you at the business end. 

Still, the lack of any particular ideology robs Ui’s political theatre of some of its point. As does the script’s reluctance to broker the difference between the 90 per cent or more of people who voted Nazi under thumbscrews, and the millions who did so freely, who signed up as members, learned all the songs, dreamed sweet dreams of the fatherland. 

Why concern yourself with performing unless you have a decisive role in mind for the audience? What do you have to sell them? What plays well to the gallery, night after night? 

This thematic discomfort isn’t down to the staging - far from it. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui has something in common with Othello. 

Seduce

Successful, nuanced, thought-provoking renderings can highlight the uncertainties at the core of the text, those which might threaten to pull so powerfully in different directions that the seams of the whole begin to tear. 

All politics may involve theatre, but it is no coincidence that fascism’s greatest creative innovations were in spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl’s nauseating propaganda films innovated much of what we know today as the standard language of film.

The RSC has nimbly drawn out the play’s focus on political theatre in the schemes of the gun-toting demagogue - so nimbly in fact, that it makes me want to sit down with Brecht himself and ask him more about why, in 1930s Germany, he thinks it made such a decisive difference.

The staging does not attempt to wholly seduce us - there are abrupt reminders of the stakes at play, real blood on the cauliflowers and real death in the throng. 

Questioning

People lurk in corners, bundle the unsuspecting off into the fog, never to be seen again. Rather, it toys with our capacity to be seduced. 

Linnen reports that during the interval people have said, “I want [Ui] to win, I’m excited by him. He’s weird but he’s magnetic and mesmerizing.” 

Then comes the second half. This alone is testament to a production bold enough to ask serious questions about complicity, about our inability to draw clean lines between the critic and the bystander, between the entertained and the seduced. 

“You don't need to come down on a certain side as long as you're questioning always. Why is this person saying this? Why am I clapping? Why do I feel this way? Why am I laughing? If we question it, then it will lead us to some answers that are useful for us, right?”

This Author

Eleanor Penny is an editor at The Ecologist. She writes essays, journalism, fiction and poetry. Sign up to her Substack ‘Howl Noises’.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is at the RSC Stratford Upon Avon until Saturday, 30 May 2026.