Mark Gatiss Info JPN

Matthew Sweet: In an essay from 1926, Brecht said he was aiming for a cold and highly intellectual style of theatre. “I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed.” Does The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui fit the pattern?

Mark Gatiss: John Fuegi’s brilliant book The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht makes it abundantly clear that Brecht was an absolute monster of the first water. A constant theme is how often people, ironically, compared him to Hitler. Brecht had an apparent contempt for people enjoying themselves at the theatre whilst having a streak of tinsel through him the size of the Wilhelmstrasse. You have to take what he says with an entire salt mine.

German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), pictured in New Jersey in 1946 © Getty Images

MS: And all the theory too? Verfremdungseffekt — the alienation effect — which asks actors to work against emotional engagement?

MG: It’s a genuine technique, of course, but I don’t think he really believed it. I honestly don’t. In the 1960s, Christopher Godwin, who’s in this production, worked with someone from [Brecht’s theatre] the Berliner Ensemble and dared to ask her about the Verfremdungseffekt. And she went: “It’s just something he said at a lunchtime.”

MS: That’s quite handy for you. It means you don’t have to forget everything you discovered about playing real politicians — like Peter Mandelson [in the 2015 film Coalition]. And with Ui, you know who you’re playing. Ui is a Chicago gangster, but the play is a beat-for-beat description of Hitler’s rise to power, and if you somehow manage to miss that, there are signs held up to tell you so.

MG: There have been productions where he doesn’t have the ’tache or the hair, but I’m having them. And some teeth too. But that’s just me. I was 15 when I first saw the play. Robin Askwith at Darlington Civic Theatre. Whenever I tell the story, people go: “What, him from Confessions of a Window Cleaner?” And the answer is yes. He was very funny and really frightening. A very skilled comic actor. At the end, Robin gave that astonishing curtain speech — “the bitch that bore him is in heat again” — and pulled off his moustache. And then it blacked out. We all just sat there in the stalls. Something changed in me. It was incredibly powerful and it’s stayed with me all my life. And here I am, a mere 45 years later, finally doing it.

MS: That’s the line with which Brecht sends you off into the night. “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men, for though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.” How did you understand that line when you were 15?

MG: I knew about Cable Street. I knew about [1930s British fascist leader] Oswald Mosley trying again in the 1950s. In those days the National Front was very present, but it was a fringe thing. And I remember thinking that the warning of the play had worked. It was always a warning from history. But now it’s not. It seems incredible that we have to sit here and say that once upon a time there was a settled idea that the Nazis were bad and now it’s somehow up for debate.

MS: Do you feel that heat that Brecht talks about in that line?

MG: Yes. A reproductive heat. Reminds me of The Omen.

MS: Has the bitch already given birth? Are those puppies padding around now?

Antony Sher in the title role of ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ at London’s National Theatre in 1991 © Alamy

Al Pacino as Arturo Ui at New York’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts in 2002 © Joan Marcus/ArenaPAL

MG: Yes, and I don’t think we should be shy of saying it. The real thing, as well as opportunists and cynics who are exactly the sort of people who would slip on a black shirt and a pair of jackboots in a heartbeat. In those big photos of Hitler, they’d be third-tier, somewhere near the back, grinning. They’re the worst of us, these people. Steve Bannon — a man whose screenplays were turned down, like Hitler’s artwork or Goebbels’ writing — says that ICE deployments are a perfect rehearsal for preventing another election being “stolen”. In other words, using them to overturn the results of the midterms. He’s not said this in secret. I just feel so much that impotence is the curse of our age. We are those people from the 1930s who we used to look at and think: why didn’t they do something? But what can you do?

MS: Don’t you think the habit of reaching for those parallels is one of the difficulties of the present moment? It’s quite hard to map fascism on to the authoritarians of today.

MG: It’s as Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” It’s not exactly the same, but it’s very close. The instinct is the same. But the fight is nebulous. Until it’s actually brought to a head.

MS: You and I often talk about the state of the world — and I think I’m a bit more optimistic than you are. I say things like: feeling like you’re at a moment when everything is about to fall off a cliff, that’s quite a consistent feeling across time.

Mark Gatiss in rehearsals for ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ © Marc Brenner

MG: Chronocentrism! Someone was saying to me only yesterday, the world is always in a state. And you go, yes, it is, but periodically it does get worse. Two big occasions in recent memory. So, as poncy as it might seem, it’s art’s duty, I think, to try and fight back. And this, to me, is the play to do it with. Ui is a loser. A joke. And then, through a series of terrible events, his gang of misfits gets what they want. And as we see in the modern parallels, they give in to all their worst desires. When it was first published in Germany, it was just called The Rise of Arturo Ui. The resistible part is the real lesson. Here it is. Here’s what happened. Don't let it happen again. And oh my God, it’s happening again. That’s the message.