I’m a natural optimist… but that’s taken a pounding,” says Mark Gatiss. That might not be surprising given he’s spent the past few weeks preparing to play Adolf Hitler.
Well, not technically Hitler. Gatiss, the writer and actor known for TV favourites including Sherlock, Doctor Who and The League of Gentlemen, is donning a toothbrush moustache for a revival of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 parable that reimagines the führer as a vegetable-peddling mobster in 1930s Chicago. Written in two weeks, the play charts Arturo’s rise to power, with events closely mirroring Hitler’s ascent. It is, says Gatiss, “like a big sketch – it’s deliberately cartoony. It’s like if someone suddenly wrote a big play about Trump trying to seize Greenland. But there are parts of it that are chilling.”
Arturo Ui is directed by Seán Linnen for the Royal Shakespeare Company; hence, Gatiss speaks to me over video from Stratford. He begins our interview by wafting a sprig of flowers in front of the screen. “I’m just going to put some spring-ness in the picture, to make it look nice,” he says. It’s hard to think of a more incongruous piece of mise-en-scene to garnish a conversation that revolves, mostly, around the topic of fascism. The flowers might say “spring”, but for Gatiss and many of the rest of us, it feels like we’re on the precipice of a cold, dark winter.
It’s clear that the figure of Donald Trump – a man frequently accused of pulling from the fascist playbook – looms over a production like this. The day before we chat, Trump is making headlines for threats to Iran, including a social media post that warned: “a whole civilisation will die tonight”. Gatiss sighs. “The rules are so f***ed,” he says. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’ve stopped listening to the news, except for bulletins occasionally. The constant drip of it is just debilitating. I mean, last night… this might be hyperbolic, but it felt a bit like how the Cuban missile crisis must have felt.”
Gatiss says he has been eyeing the role of Arturo Ui for over four decades, ever since he first saw a production at Darlington Civic Theatre in his early teens. “I was very aware of fascist resurrections in Britain – the BNP and the NF – around that time,” he says. “But it was obviously a very fringe thing. So it did feel like it was a warning from history, but not too urgent in that way.”
Now, with Trump in the White House and the far right knocking on the door of power in Britain, there is little question of Arturo Ui’s urgency. “We used to take great comfort from the reassuring myth that, for the British people, fascism was not to our taste,” says Gatiss. “There’s a sort of ‘Blitz Spirit’ myth about that. But the truth is, of course, it’s very powerful. And as George Orwell said, when fascism comes to Britain, it won’t be wearing jackboots. It’ll be disguised as a cheery policeman. They’ll use the lion and the unicorn, not the swastika.”
He mentions Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, whose own stances on immigration and British nationalism have led to him being accused of espousing fascist ideologies. “The danger, I think, is even if American fascism implodes, that we still ‘catch the cold’, as it were,” Gatiss continues. “There’s an incredible narrative telling us that Nigel Farage will be Prime Minister. And if you actually look at the people opposed to him, it’s a huge bloc. But we’re not being told that. It almost feels inevitable, and that’s what’s very frightening – because those ‘inevitabilities’ have a way of coming true.”
When it comes to Arturo Ui, there’s an irony, Gatiss notes, in Brecht’s own authoritarian streak. The late German practitioner is indisputably one of the biggest names of 20th-century theatre – but posthumous biographies (particularly John Fuegi’s from 1994) paint a damning picture of Brecht’s working relationships, and call into question the authorship of many of the plays published under his name. “It’s quite startling how monstrous [Brecht] was and how many of his close associates compared him to Hitler,” Gatiss says. “He had an incredible magnetism, both personally and sexually. But he took credit for so many people’s work, and sort of ate them up. It’s a funny thing that we use the term ‘Brechtian’ – in a way he was a trademark.”
People are always nostalgic, to our very bones
Mark Gatiss
There are, I’m sensing, two sides to Gatiss. There’s the sort of erudite, self-described “politics junkie” who reads books on Brecht and has two Olivier awards to his name (for Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue in 2024 and Three Days in the Country in 2016). Then there is Gatiss the unabashed nerd, who quotes Star Trek, loves science fiction, and whose biggest professional associations might be Doctor Who and Sherlock. Born to a working-class family in Sedgefield, County Durham, Gatiss grew up an avid follower of Doctor Who and got his start as a writer on Virgin’s New Adventures, a series of Who novels. It wasn’t until years later – after he’d risen to prominence with the League of Gentlemen sketch comedy team alongside Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton – that he got the opportunity to write for the show itself, when it was reincarnated in 2005.
Doctor Who was, significantly, Gatiss’s first collaboration with Steven Moffat: the pair would go on to create Sherlock together, which Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in a modernised spin on Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction. (Later, they would reunite too for the 2020 Dracula miniseries.) Gatiss has, he says, been hounded, Baskerville-style, by questions about a potential return for Sherlock, since its fourth series concluded in 2017. “There’s nothing wrong with [being asked],” he says. “People are always nostalgic, to our very bones. We’d like to do a film, if possible. But the truth is, unfortunately, [talking about the possibility] just becomes a clickbait thing.”
He continues: “I’ve literally spent years being asked about The League of Gentlemen, [whether we’d bring that back]. And then when we did three reunion specials in 2017, we were actually able to say ‘yes, we are’. And as soon as we’ve done them, people just started asking again. You go, ‘F***. You can’t win!’”
Gatiss hasn’t been avoiding television (or movies, for that matter – last year he had small roles in two huge-scale blockbusters, Fantastic Four: First Steps and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning) but there’s a particular liberty that comes with theatrical work. Staunchly outspoken political pieces like Arturo Ui can find a place on stage; on television, it’s often a different proposition.
“Being provocative, and making a firm statement… it’s more in the history of theatre, isn’t it?” Gatiss says. “Definitely, TV’s become less political than it was in its heyday.”
But, of course, there are exceptions. “Look at Mr Bates vs the Post Office! Which I think is the most important piece of social television since Cathy Come Home. It was a national scandal and it did change things. And the speed with which that drama was put together… the response is heartening.”
ITV’s four-episode drama Mr Bates ended up igniting such outrage over a real-life miscarriage of justice at the British Post Office that it led to legislation in parliament. Gatiss is under no illusions that something like Aturo Ui – taking on the much more vast and less wrangleable force of fascism – will “shift the world off its axis. But you have to do what you can, microcosmically,” he says. “That’s all you can do. I don’t think it means that plays don’t have any power, because I think they really do. One of the things that pierces us all so much is a sense of impotence, but also a weird feeling that it’s all on our shoulders.”
It’s a small comfort, maybe – perennially fighting the “good fight” no matter the outcome. I ask him, finally, about the future, about that battered optimism of his. Does he hold out much hope of things getting better?
“I remember the great Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek two and six, and wrote Star Trek four – the great ones,” he replies. “And when he [started work] on Star Trek, this very utopian vision of the future, he was asked what he thought of the future. He went, ‘Oh, the future is ashes, my friend. Ashes.’”
Gatiss breaks into a mordant laugh. “That was him, not me.”
‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ is on at the RSC’s Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 30 May