The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

The Resistible rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht's darkly comic allegory of authoritarianism is a play that straddles past and present. Written in 1941, it was conceived as a warning; a grotesque gangster-inflected retelling of the rise of Adolf Hitler. It holds out the warning that such a rise is not, in fact, inevitable – it can be resisted.

In a new production, Mark Gatiss steps into the role of Arturo Ui, a character who is at once absurd, ridiculous, sinister, and terrifying. It's a part that delicately walks the tightrope between satire and menace.

So how does a play rooted in 20th century politics land in Britain today? What does it mean to stage breath in an era saturated with political performance and media spectacle? And can satire still function as a warning rather than just a mirror?

Tanjil Rashid speaks with Mark Gatiss in this fascinating and wide-ranging interview.

Mark Gatiss is speaking at the Stratford Literary Festival on Sunday 10 May. Book tickets: https://www.stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk/

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Or has the term lost its meaning?

It’s a label that’s everywhere now: used by political commentators, thrown around on social media, and increasingly a part of everyday conversation.
In recent months it's been used to describe matters including Indian cricket, Sainsbury's use of facial recognition, the 'Dubai Dream'.

But what did George Orwell actually warn us about, and how closely does our modern world resemble it?

Nick Harris speaks to acclaimed Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, whose latest film Orwell: 2+2=5 revisits Orwell not as a distant, dystopian novelist, but as a deeply political thinker, shaped by his own life experience: his birth in colonial India, his immersion in the working class, his wartime fight against fascism.

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Last night, the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a 10-day mission to space and a lunar flyby. The voyage, which included the first woman and a non-US citizen to take part in a lunar mission, is part of a program to place humans once again on the Moon by 2028, a return after 56 years apart.

But why do we bother? Where does this fascination come from?

Can the moon teach us something about ourselves? Is it a hunger for something different?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Rebecca Boyle, science writer and author of Our Moon: A Human History.

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It's almost impossible to separate how we think about modern life from the phenomenon that is capitalism, and to think, what would life look like without it?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sven Beckert, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History, to trace the long emergence of capitalism, and to ask what the world looked like before it took hold.
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Michael Pollan, a writer best known for his work on the effect of psychedelics, has taken a journey into the inner mind.

For much of modern history, we’ve understood the mind in comparison to our most advanced machines. Once it was clockwork, then looms, now computers. Each metaphor promises clarity - the ability to be mapped and modelled - but each, in its own way, falls short.

Drawing on philosophy, literature and his own experiments with altered states, in Michael Pollan takes aim at this habit of thinking.

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