A malevolent mediocrity stalks the stage. He wears a stained greatcoat and has sallow skin with heavy circles under the eyes. Most unsettling of all is the silly/sinister little section of black moustache and the cowlick of hair that constantly sags into his right eye.
This is Arturo Ui, a small-time Chicago gangster with his mind set on total domination and the play is Bertolt Brecht’s scintillating satire about Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany. The actor playing this tyrant in the making is Mark Gatiss, who demonstrates once again the uncanny ability he has to select projects that chime with the cultural zeitgeist.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (written in 1941 but not produced until 1958) is an undoubtedly potent play whenever it is performed. Yet the unsettling echoes of our 2026 world order, where strong men leaders deal with the pesky business of democracy by circumventing it and with tricky opponents by getting rid of them, are unmistakable.
Gatiss as Gabriel Book in Bookish (Photo: Nicola Young)We watch, stunned but somehow not surprised, as Gatiss’s Ui, a chilling combination of obsequious and minatory, corrupts the judicial process and before moving on to muzzle the free press. He doesn’t use the phrase “fake news,” but it is nonetheless hanging in the air all around us. As Gatiss himself remarks in a programme article, “We are those people of the 1930s who you look back on and say, ‘Why didn’t they do anything?’”
Gatiss, an intriguing shapeshifter of a performer, has been involved in startling, era-defining work for nearly three decades. He first came to national attention with his work – as co-creator, co-writer and performer – in the dark comedy The League of Gentlemen. Its surreal humour pushed British comedy in an exciting new direction at the turn of the millennium and paved the way for much subsequent offbeat work.
Just when the rise of the streaming services was beginning to put terrestrial television under strain, Gatiss teamed up with Steven Moffat in 2010 to create the BBC’s Sherlock. These glossy, tricky reboots of Conan Doyle reminded us precisely when we needed it of how clever and classy British television could be; unsurprisingly, the series, as well as lead Benedict Cumberbatch, went on to become a global success story. Gatiss memorably haunted the action as Sherlock’s condescending older brother Mycroft.
Gatiss memorably haunted the action as Sherlock’s condescending older brother Mycroft (Photo: Hartswood Films 2016/Colin Hutton)Ever a writer as well as an actor, Gatiss teamed up with Moffat again to author several episodes of the rebooted Doctor Who, while all the time nurturing an ever more impressive stage career.
He won his first Olivier Award in 2016 for a supporting role in Three Days in the Country, before upgrading to the Best Actor Olivier in 2024 for The Motive and the Cue, in which he gave an acerbically comic portrayal of an elegantly out-of-his-depth John Gielgud struggling to contain and direct a wayward Richard Burton in a production of Hamlet. This clash between old and new ways of doing things reverberated far beyond the theatrical world.
And what of Gatiss’s most recent television work, last year’s Bookish? At a point when the country was longing for the certainties and simplicities of an earlier time, Gatiss and co-writer Matthew Sweet offered us the cosy crime of a mystery-solving bookshop owner in 1946 London – with one significant difference. Gatiss’s Gabriel Book is in a “lavender marriage” to Polly Walker’s Trottie, a fact that gave rise to useful discussion of historically suppressed sexuality. Once again, Gatiss demonstrated his penchant for selecting the right project at the perfect time.
Which, of course, brings us back to Ui. Gatiss speaks Brecht’s chillingly memorable epilogue in his own voice, reminding us that “the bitch that bore him [Ui/Hitler] is in heat again.” Don’t we know it.
‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ is at the RSC Swan, Stratford upon Avon until 30 May (rsc.org.uk)
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