“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” So wrote William Shakespeare in As You Like It. Yet certain modern-day theatregoers apparently do not understand the difference between the space upon the boards and off them; hence, they have taken Shakespeare’s words literally and decided to reshape the world around them into one gigantic interactive left-wing morality play, with themselves as the central heroes and heroines.
Working-class ‘groundlings’ crowding into the pit of the theatre during Shakespeare’s own day were notoriously unruly, but such misbehaviour was largely limited to hurling abuse and rotten fruit at thespians they took a dislike to. Middle-class theatregoers in our own day are far worse, actively attacking and trying to kill any actors they don’t like—on the grounds they are supposedly ‘Nazis’.
Political purges
Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists is a 2020 piece of theatrical agitprop by Portuguese playwright Tito Rodrigues, concerning a left-wing family in a near-future Europe dominated by the nationalist right, who each year gather together to re-enact an age-old household tradition—to kidnap and murder a ‘fascist,’ by which label they actually mean ‘someone who believes in strong borders.’ The play ends with a scene where this year’s latest abducted ‘Nazi’ is permitted to give a valedictory speech, laying out his desired policy platform (which is basically that of the perfectly mainstream Portuguese right-wing conservative party Chega).
According to the Classical-era theatrical theory of Aristotle, such dramatic climaxes are supposed to provide audience members with a valuable moment of ‘catharsis’, or ‘purging’, when they are able to release strong, pent-up emotions via the cleansing vehicle of art. Unfortunately, some contemporary left-wing audiences now take the idea of enacting a theatreland ‘purge’ a little too literally.
Catarina had its German premiere in Bochum this Valentine’s Day, although there was no love lost between the audience and the actor portraying the ‘fascist’ on-stage, Ole Lagerpusch. According to a review from a disgusted German theatre-critic, Martin Krumbholz, when Ole gave his final monologue, speaking in character of the pressing need for measures like mass remigration, the crowd turned nasty. At first, they merely booed and whistled. Then, a chant of “Stop! Stop!” began to grow, before someone threw an orange at Lagerpusch. Then, men stormed the stage, trying to drag the actor down into the crowd, going for his throat when he dared fight back.
As the show must always go on, Lagerpusch bravely stuck to his script until a member of theatre management felt compelled to rush on stage herself and announce this was a fictional theatre performance, that Ole was an actor, not an actual Nazi, and that he was only reciting a series of scripted lines he himself did not even believe. But, as critic Martin Krumbholz wrote in his review of events at the Schauspielhaus Theatre that night:
Parts of the Bochum audience … are apparently too stupid, one has to put it bluntly, to distinguish between fiction and reality; in doing so, they reveal the stupendous self-righteousness of a milieu that considers its own opinion to be beyond reproach from the outset … The audience knows everything better. Ole Lagerpusch did not give his lecture in the shape of Hitler or [Thuringia AfD leader Bjorn] Höcke, foaming at the mouth, but in the softest Lagerpusch sound. In the end, that even made everything worse. People believed they were cleverly exposing covert content and became angry. Presumably, the Schauspielhaus will precede the second performance with a trigger-warning. It seems indispensable.
And, if a trigger warning did not do the trick, then the theatre management had another health and safety trick up their sleeve: hiring extra security guards for all future performances. As such employees tend to dress up in black shirts and peaked caps, however, there was a distinct possibility they themselves would end up being assaulted by histrionic ticket-buyers one evening too, as being close friends of Benito Mussolini or Oswald Mosley.
Exit, stage far right
Disturbingly, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists has provoked violence amongst audiences before. During one 2024 performance in New York, which, tellingly, took place only a week after that other well-known ‘Nazi’ Donald Trump had just been re-elected, one critic in attendance tells us the following occurred when the kidnapped ideologue gave his concluding soliloquy:
The highbrow audience’s response to being obliged to listen to this typical right-populist fare was an all-out revolt. The crowd chanted slogans, booed, and heckled; some stood and turned their backs to the stage; others stormed out; at least one man attempted to charge the stage and was fended off by an usher. ‘Shoot him!’ they shouted repeatedly … I wrote to [the theatre’s] press office the next day to ask whether there had been plants in the crowd, egging on the reaction. No, I was told: ‘The response is entirely organic and varies with each performance.’
What the audiences didn’t seem to like was that they had been set up to anticipate the pleasing climactic scene of a ‘far-right’ politician being quite correctly shot in the head like Donald himself once nearly was—before, at the very last moment, he is reprieved and allowed to have his voice after all.
The basic plot is that one younger female member of the ‘Antifa Family,’ as they may be dubbed, begins to doubt the efficacy of the left-wing establishment’s systematic silencing of all true right-wing political opponents. After all, the family had been doing that in the most extreme way possible for decades now, yet here they were, living in an imaginary future Europe where parties like Chega and AfD totally dominated. Rather than killing and gagging such people, maybe it would have been better to just engage and then defeat them in free and open debate?
The young girl’s aunt says no and suggests murdering all members of Chega/the Nazi Party instead, at which point the New York audience, anticipating such a massacre, cheered. Thinking that perhaps they have now become the true oppressors here, not the right-wingers, the niece takes up her gun … and shoots all her family members dead, not the ‘Nazi,’ before allowing him to give his long speech, which concludes with the lines “The future belongs to us!” The niece’s point would seem to be along the lines of “If liberals like us hadn’t treated normal people and their concerns as if they were evil neo-Nazis, maybe the rise of these right-wing parties we so dislike would never even have occurred.”
A play which at first seemed like simple leftist agitprop is therefore finally revealed as being something a little more nuanced; yet nuance is not something the average left-wing theatre audience these days wants. Instead, they prefer to bay for blood.
Empty Wessel
Despite the ambiguity of his script’s message, Catarina’s author Tiago Rodrigues would certainly appear to be on the Left, seeing one of the main aims of his work as being to force his audience to ask itself, “Can theatre bring us out of apathy? Can it get us thinking about creating a better society?” In other words, it is still a form of agitprop, just of a more thoughtful and less crude kind than the average left-wing theatregoer these days can apparently cope with.
This rather instrumentalist view of the playwright’s art is one widely shared amongst today’s theatre-going class, with the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) holding a special conference session last month entitled ‘The Beauty of Killing Fascism’, inspired by Rodrigues’ work, which aimed to redefine the theatre not primarily as an arena for encountering ideas, entertainment or beauty, but purely as “a place for disrupting fascism.” Fascism’s initial Italian progenitors like Mussolini and d’Annunzio used theatre as a vehicle for propagandising, says ACLA, so “if theatre played a pivotal role in fascism’s birth, perhaps it can prescribe a script for its beautiful death.”
What do these people even mean by ‘fascism’, though? Basically, anyone whose politics they happen to disagree with. Tiago Rodrigues admits that, in his play:
I used the word ‘fascists’ in a scientifically incorrect manner because other words that would apply to extreme far-wing movements that are inspired by the fascists are now normalised … So I demand the right to say fascist because the other words that should hurt, like extreme right-wing or populist, don’t hurt anymore … I can understand that the historian or the social scientist … would say that’s not correct, but as a citizen, I find it very correct.
But repeatedly and inaccurately calling people ‘fascists’ on-stage, on-screen, and in the media, who are in fact just perfectly ordinary people who happen to think differently, can provoke unpleasant real-life consequences.
It’s not just the odd orange being tossed at an actor with a Hitler moustache: even further off-stage, it also involves outright acts of murder like that of Quentin Deranque, the harmless French student kicked to death in the street by a far-left mob of fantasists in Lyon last month, under the pretence that they thought he, too, was a ‘Nazi.’ A public rally in Quentin’s memory was then disgracefully portrayed by the media and politicians as though it was a neo-Nazi march, and Quentin a modern-day version of Horst Wessel, the martyred 1930s Nazi stormtrooper.
Even Wikipedia describes Quentin as a “far-right activist.” Why? What had he done? Nothing but turn up to a protest meeting of the conservative feminist organisation Collectif Némésis to protect vulnerable female members from assault by left-wingers and Muslims, whose deranged, open-borders, pro-rape alliance they oppose. He had also dared convert to Catholicism (not Islam, like you’re now supposed to). To people of a contemporary Antifa mindset, this meant he may as well have been dressed up in a comedy Führer fancy-dress outfit; Ole Lagerpusch isn’t the only greasepaint ‘Nazi’ brutally assaulted for being something he actually wasn’t of late.
As Shakespeare also once wrote, “’Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.” And the eyes of a madman that beats an innocent young man to death for supposedly being one.
Theatre of the Absurd: Audiences Assaulting Fictional ‘Nazis’—On Stage and Off
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“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” So wrote William Shakespeare in As You Like It. Yet certain modern-day theatregoers apparently do not understand the difference between the space upon the boards and off them; hence, they have taken Shakespeare’s words literally and decided to reshape the world around them into one gigantic interactive left-wing morality play, with themselves as the central heroes and heroines.
Working-class ‘groundlings’ crowding into the pit of the theatre during Shakespeare’s own day were notoriously unruly, but such misbehaviour was largely limited to hurling abuse and rotten fruit at thespians they took a dislike to. Middle-class theatregoers in our own day are far worse, actively attacking and trying to kill any actors they don’t like—on the grounds they are supposedly ‘Nazis’.
Political purges
Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists is a 2020 piece of theatrical agitprop by Portuguese playwright Tito Rodrigues, concerning a left-wing family in a near-future Europe dominated by the nationalist right, who each year gather together to re-enact an age-old household tradition—to kidnap and murder a ‘fascist,’ by which label they actually mean ‘someone who believes in strong borders.’ The play ends with a scene where this year’s latest abducted ‘Nazi’ is permitted to give a valedictory speech, laying out his desired policy platform (which is basically that of the perfectly mainstream Portuguese right-wing conservative party Chega).
According to the Classical-era theatrical theory of Aristotle, such dramatic climaxes are supposed to provide audience members with a valuable moment of ‘catharsis’, or ‘purging’, when they are able to release strong, pent-up emotions via the cleansing vehicle of art. Unfortunately, some contemporary left-wing audiences now take the idea of enacting a theatreland ‘purge’ a little too literally.
Catarina had its German premiere in Bochum this Valentine’s Day, although there was no love lost between the audience and the actor portraying the ‘fascist’ on-stage, Ole Lagerpusch. According to a review from a disgusted German theatre-critic, Martin Krumbholz, when Ole gave his final monologue, speaking in character of the pressing need for measures like mass remigration, the crowd turned nasty. At first, they merely booed and whistled. Then, a chant of “Stop! Stop!” began to grow, before someone threw an orange at Lagerpusch. Then, men stormed the stage, trying to drag the actor down into the crowd, going for his throat when he dared fight back.
As the show must always go on, Lagerpusch bravely stuck to his script until a member of theatre management felt compelled to rush on stage herself and announce this was a fictional theatre performance, that Ole was an actor, not an actual Nazi, and that he was only reciting a series of scripted lines he himself did not even believe. But, as critic Martin Krumbholz wrote in his review of events at the Schauspielhaus Theatre that night:
And, if a trigger warning did not do the trick, then the theatre management had another health and safety trick up their sleeve: hiring extra security guards for all future performances. As such employees tend to dress up in black shirts and peaked caps, however, there was a distinct possibility they themselves would end up being assaulted by histrionic ticket-buyers one evening too, as being close friends of Benito Mussolini or Oswald Mosley.
Exit, stage far right
Disturbingly, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists has provoked violence amongst audiences before. During one 2024 performance in New York, which, tellingly, took place only a week after that other well-known ‘Nazi’ Donald Trump had just been re-elected, one critic in attendance tells us the following occurred when the kidnapped ideologue gave his concluding soliloquy:
What the audiences didn’t seem to like was that they had been set up to anticipate the pleasing climactic scene of a ‘far-right’ politician being quite correctly shot in the head like Donald himself once nearly was—before, at the very last moment, he is reprieved and allowed to have his voice after all.
The basic plot is that one younger female member of the ‘Antifa Family,’ as they may be dubbed, begins to doubt the efficacy of the left-wing establishment’s systematic silencing of all true right-wing political opponents. After all, the family had been doing that in the most extreme way possible for decades now, yet here they were, living in an imaginary future Europe where parties like Chega and AfD totally dominated. Rather than killing and gagging such people, maybe it would have been better to just engage and then defeat them in free and open debate?
The young girl’s aunt says no and suggests murdering all members of Chega/the Nazi Party instead, at which point the New York audience, anticipating such a massacre, cheered. Thinking that perhaps they have now become the true oppressors here, not the right-wingers, the niece takes up her gun … and shoots all her family members dead, not the ‘Nazi,’ before allowing him to give his long speech, which concludes with the lines “The future belongs to us!” The niece’s point would seem to be along the lines of “If liberals like us hadn’t treated normal people and their concerns as if they were evil neo-Nazis, maybe the rise of these right-wing parties we so dislike would never even have occurred.”
A play which at first seemed like simple leftist agitprop is therefore finally revealed as being something a little more nuanced; yet nuance is not something the average left-wing theatre audience these days wants. Instead, they prefer to bay for blood.
Empty Wessel
Despite the ambiguity of his script’s message, Catarina’s author Tiago Rodrigues would certainly appear to be on the Left, seeing one of the main aims of his work as being to force his audience to ask itself, “Can theatre bring us out of apathy? Can it get us thinking about creating a better society?” In other words, it is still a form of agitprop, just of a more thoughtful and less crude kind than the average left-wing theatregoer these days can apparently cope with.
This rather instrumentalist view of the playwright’s art is one widely shared amongst today’s theatre-going class, with the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) holding a special conference session last month entitled ‘The Beauty of Killing Fascism’, inspired by Rodrigues’ work, which aimed to redefine the theatre not primarily as an arena for encountering ideas, entertainment or beauty, but purely as “a place for disrupting fascism.” Fascism’s initial Italian progenitors like Mussolini and d’Annunzio used theatre as a vehicle for propagandising, says ACLA, so “if theatre played a pivotal role in fascism’s birth, perhaps it can prescribe a script for its beautiful death.”
What do these people even mean by ‘fascism’, though? Basically, anyone whose politics they happen to disagree with. Tiago Rodrigues admits that, in his play:
But repeatedly and inaccurately calling people ‘fascists’ on-stage, on-screen, and in the media, who are in fact just perfectly ordinary people who happen to think differently, can provoke unpleasant real-life consequences.
It’s not just the odd orange being tossed at an actor with a Hitler moustache: even further off-stage, it also involves outright acts of murder like that of Quentin Deranque, the harmless French student kicked to death in the street by a far-left mob of fantasists in Lyon last month, under the pretence that they thought he, too, was a ‘Nazi.’ A public rally in Quentin’s memory was then disgracefully portrayed by the media and politicians as though it was a neo-Nazi march, and Quentin a modern-day version of Horst Wessel, the martyred 1930s Nazi stormtrooper.
Even Wikipedia describes Quentin as a “far-right activist.” Why? What had he done? Nothing but turn up to a protest meeting of the conservative feminist organisation Collectif Némésis to protect vulnerable female members from assault by left-wingers and Muslims, whose deranged, open-borders, pro-rape alliance they oppose. He had also dared convert to Catholicism (not Islam, like you’re now supposed to). To people of a contemporary Antifa mindset, this meant he may as well have been dressed up in a comedy Führer fancy-dress outfit; Ole Lagerpusch isn’t the only greasepaint ‘Nazi’ brutally assaulted for being something he actually wasn’t of late.
As Shakespeare also once wrote, “’Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.” And the eyes of a madman that beats an innocent young man to death for supposedly being one.
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