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“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”

“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”

Last updated on: May 14, 2026 at 4:20 pm by Dan Peterson

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“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” 2026-05-14T16:20:21-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Accra Ghana Temple by night (LDS Media Library)

I missed the first installment of the BYUtv series mentioned here, but I look forward to seeing it when we’re back. This promises to be quite interesting. I’m especially glad that they took up the story from Ghana: “‘Voices for Faith’ Part 1: In defense of religious freedom: During ‘The Freeze’ in Ghana, Latter-day Saints were restricted from gathering to worship, demonstrating the value of religious freedom”

And, of course, you shouldn’t miss Becoming Brigham (becomingbrigham.com). The sixteenth (16th) installment of it — which focuses (via interviews with Casey Griffiths and Gerrit Dirkmaat) on Emma Smith and Brigham Young, their relationship to each other, and their different relationships to the Prophet Joseph Smith — is now up, here.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph). Our hotel is essentially just behind the tower.

Today hasn’t gone the way we had hoped and anticipated. Our hotel is directly across a quiet little street from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which sits on the bank of the River Avon. The area adjacent to the reception desk features photographs of some of the actors who have played title roles a few feet away (e.g., Sir Patrick Stewart, Dame Janet Suzman, David Tennant, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Richard Burton, Vivien Leigh, Dame Helen Mirren, and Sir Laurence Olivier); it’s a pretty distinguished bunch.

Anyway, it’s a perfect location for theater goers. And we had tickets for a play tonight: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (originally, Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui), subtitled “A parable play.” Written by Bertolt Brecht and premiering in 1941, it tells a story about the rise of a fictional 1930s Chicago mob boss and his efforts to control the “cauliflower racket” by ruthlessly eliminating his competitors. The play is, pretty obviously, a satirical allegory of the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany during decade or two before the Second World War, and the production left absolutely no doubt about it, right down to Nazi-style armbands and the Hitleresque mustache and haircut of Mark Gatiss in the title role. The allusions were anything but subtle. (I just can’t for the life of me imagine why the Royal Shakespeare Company has thought of staging it right now.)

As it happens, though, only I attended the performance: My wife took an unfortunate fall yesterday evening, and we even opted out of today’s walking tour of Shakespearean sites here in Stratford. (Fortunately, we’ve seen them multiple times before.) Fortunately, I was able to get some work done during the day. But my wife decided, alas, that she wouldn’t be able to endure two and a half hours seated in the theater. That really saddened me. She would have loved the play.

This dead white European male, one Will Shakspear of the old white European town called Stratford-upon-Avon, is traditionally regarded as the author of such Elizabethan-period white male poems and dramas as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Henry V, and the “Sonnets.”

I suppose, while I’m here in Stratford-upon-Avon, that it’s an appropriate time to cite the Bard’s famous encomium to his native land, as spoken by John of Gaunt in Richard II:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. (Act 2, Scene 1)

Driving, as we have done, fairly extensively through the English countryside, it’s impossible to deny how very beautiful it often is.

As a highly-paid Latter-day Saint apologist, I normally stay in Warwick Castle when I’m in this area. (It’s shown here in a Wikimedia Commons public domain photo looking across the River Avon.) Somebody fouled up this time, though, and — believe me — heads are going to roll. They don’t call me the Miranda Priestly of the Restoration for nothing!

A couple of weeks back, I posted running accounts here of the food that I consumed during our filming trip for Becoming Brigham down in central and southern Utah. (Disgracefully, I eat just about every single day of the week, every day of the year, even while traveling.) The point was to make a little fun of the folks at the Peterson Obsession Board who like to pretend that my motivation for engaging in apologetics and for my involvement with the Interpreter Foundation is my desire to live a life of epicurean dining and luxurious travel. That filming trip, it turns out, was neither epicurean nor luxurious.

But the folks at the Obsession Board are absolutely dedicated to their task of chronicling my depraved buffoonery, and that fixated dedication makes them very agile: They had no difficulty at all in finding a new angle of attack and, taking those four days of mostly fast-food on the run as typical of my regular daily diet, they became the Vegetable Harpies, tut-tutting with righteous indignation over my nutritional choices and, as with everything else, using them as a window into the gross deficiencies of my character.

That was amusing. But it seems that I’ve unwittingly done some real damage to at least one or two of them. My Malevolent Stalker, for example, who has been anonymously monitoring my crimes, defects, cruelties, and lies (and reporting on them almost daily) for very nearly a quarter of a century, is now suffering some sort of withdrawal: He suspects — or, anyway, pretends to suspect — that my failure to provide him with daily summaries of my food choices — is intended to mask something sordid and dishonorable. Or something like that.

I hadn’t realized how fragile he is. So I apologize to him and to his disciples for wrongly giving them the impression that I would continue to supply regular nutrition reports after that trip to the culinary capitals of Fillmore, Richfield, Escalante, and St. George. It was never my plan or intention to do so, and I’m sorry to have misled them so badly.

And, once again for the record, no Interpreter Foundation funds, whether donated or obtained by chicanery, grand larceny, or blackmail, have been expended on this current tour.

Posted from Stratford-upon-Avon, England

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