2 days ago
Satire is nothing without contempt
On 30 April, the solicitors Mishcon de Reya asked me to join a panel commemorating the 25th anniversary of the High Court trial in which David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Deborah was there, alongside her lawyer, Anthony Julius. Irving's anti-Semitism had a particular purpose. Postwar, the chief obstacle to restoring the ideas of Adolf Hitler was what happened to the Jews. If their genocide could be denied, fascism could be rehabilitated. For the occasion, I prepared a list of the 16 principal characteristics of fascism which I take to be: 1) Exploitation of historic grievances 2) Frequent resort to states of emergency 3) Rule by executive order rather than by assembly 4) Disempowering of the judiciary 5) Attacks on the media 6) Threats to annex territory 7) Constant blaming of an enemy within 8) Insistence that the leader is above the law 9) Assaults on higher education and universities 10) Withdrawal from international organisations 11) Extreme nationalism 12) Elevation of the heterosexual family 13) Obsession with birth rates 14) Impassioned denial of historical truth 15) Persecution of particular racial groups and 16) Attacks on cultural institutions. With Donald Trump planning to turn the Kennedy Center in D.C. into his very own Bayreuth, we can surely say he is returning a full score card.
Theatre is normally the most uneven of art forms. You must sit through a few bad plays to discover a good one. But, for me, 2025 has been unusual. Everything I have seen is good. I had already caught Mark Rosenblatt's Giant before I saw Howard Brenton's lovely play about Churchill and Stalin. Then came Kyoto, centred on the 1997 climate conference; An Interrogation, by a new writer, Jamie Armitage; the brilliantly directed opera of Festen; and Robert Icke's Manhunt, an evening investigating Raoul Moat. Most original of all, Self Esteem staged her new album A Complicated Woman at the Duke of York's, in an evening which blazed with energy and warmth.
