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When the former Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi defected to the Reform party, he described the UK as diseased. “Our wonderful country is sick,” he said. “Britain needs Nigel Farage.” At a far-right rally last year, Elon Musk told supporters: “Violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” These sentiments are expressed, almost verbatim, in Bertolt Brecht’s exacting 1941 satire about the rise of Hitler, who frequently referred to Germany as diseased, in danger and  in urgent need of protection.

In rehearsals for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s upcoming production of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the cast have been exploring the uncanny parallels between the blackly comic melodrama and current events in Britain and across the Atlantic. “It’s the same rhetoric,” says Mark Gatiss, who stars as Arturo Ui. “You just give it 80 years. The second world war generation has died out, so it’s fertile ground again. The same bullshit works. It’s really frightening.”

First staged after the playwright’s death, Arturo Ui tracks Hitler’s advance to power through the parable of a Chicago gangster who destroys anyone who gets in his way. Gatiss is familiar with playing villains. “Someone asked me if I’d do The Traitors,” the actor says, “but I play so many baddies, people would assume I was a Traitor immediately.”

He has now put a moratorium on playing characters akin to Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes, one of the roles for which he is best known. “Me in another suit being slightly creepy,” he says. “Whispering in the monarch’s ear. I’ve done a lot of that.” But when director Seán Linnen messaged Gatiss asking if he’d considered doing Arturo Ui, the actor replied: “I’ve thought of nothing else since I was 15.” A production at Darlington Civic Theatre with Robin Askwith in the lead “sort of changed my life”, he says. “The impact it had on me.” At the end of the show, he remembers, “we all just stood in silence”.

Written after the playwright left Germany when Hitler became chancellor, Brecht presents the “resistible” rise of the Nazi dictator as enabled by the corruption of free-market capitalism. Some productions push the fictional lead into the persona of a particular dictator, with Linnen having assisted on the 2017 Donmar production that invoked Lenny Henry’s authoritarian leader as Trump-esque. The RSC’s team is letting the parable of the play speak for itself. When you hear the text, Gatiss says, “you go: ‘I’ve heard that line before, haven’t I?’” The alarming prescience of the play fuelled the RSC to move mountains to get the production staged within a year. “We said: ‘We should be doing it tomorrow, shouldn’t we?’” says Gatiss. “It was a warning from history. Now it’s the bloody muse.”

Translated by Stephen Sharkey, this new production features music from alt-rock band Placebo, whose brooding tones match the sinister nature of the story. “It suits our politics perfectly,” says vocalist Brian Molko. “We’re seeing the world run by these demagogues with no respect for international law. This play speaks to us watching these horrific things unfold on a daily basis and trying not to lose hope.” Bassist Stefan Olsdal adds: “We think we learn from history, but history shows us that we don’t.”

The duo’s debut for theatre comes as Placebo prepare for a 30th-anniversary tour, and follows in the footsteps of the RSC’s collaboration with Radiohead for Hamlet Hail to the Thief. “At this stage in our career,” says Molko, “to be offered the opportunity to stretch what we’re capable of is almost impossible to resist.” It didn’t hurt that he’s been a fan of Gatiss since The League of Gentlemen.

The pair have built their score on the brutality of the script. “We focused on coming up with different kinds of music that could represent different kinds of violence,” says Molko. He describes the process as “like being in a dark room and feeling your way around”. Where they usually have several minutes to tell a story through song, some of their compositions for this show need to last less than 30 seconds. “We knew we’d have to go for the jugular from the very start,” Molko says. The longer set-pieces are, he explains, “more rock’n’roll, loud and abrasive”. Gatiss describes one piece of music they have been rehearsing with as sounding like “casual murder”. With the team’s musical director, Alex Lee (Massive Attack, Goldfrapp), they’ve put together a band to play live every night, with the music helping the story feel more immediate for the audience.

The play was always intended to have this sense of urgency. “It was hastily written,” says Gatiss. “It’s sort of like if someone wrote a play now about Trump and Greenland. It’s like a big sketch, so it’s got this carnival atmosphere, which we’re playing up. It’s a comic nightmare.”

The play uses the deliberately ridiculous allegory of Arturo Ui taking control of the cauliflower market and bullying vegetable traders into a protection racket, echoing Nazi coercion tactics. In rehearsals, they’re experimenting with replacing guns with fish, vegetables and baguettes. When you hear a shot ring out, Gatiss says, “it sucker-punches you with the truth”.

Brecht’s works are often perceived to come with very strict rules, with terminology dealt out like a sacrosanct textbook. But Linnen’s production defies this rigidity. “It’s not at all this dry, didactic thing,” Gatiss says. This freedom has extended into the creative process. “We were given zero rules,” says Molko, “which is very much how we like to work.” Usually when they compose, Olsdal says, they are in a position where “the music is a protagonist”, so this was a new experience for them. Linnen would give them a style reference relating to one of their songs: a bit of The Bitter End energy over here, a little Pure Morning kind of energy over there.

Gatiss’s feelings towards Brecht have shifted since reading the biography of the theatrical modernist by John Fuegi, which disputes the idea that the playwright deserves credit for most of his work. “He’s sort of a brand name,” Gatiss says of the book’s thesis, which presents his plays as “almost entirely written by the remarkable women in his life. He collaborated with hundreds of people and took all the credit.” The book is hotly debated, but the team’s refusal to be cowed by preconceived ideas about Brecht provide them a sense of freedom with the show. “There’s a lot of gatekeeping that baffles me,” Gatiss remarks. “You mustn’t treat it like a holy writ.” The same, he says, is true of Shakespeare, who pops up in Brecht’s text, with Arturo Ui compared to the bard’s villainous Richard III.

Early on in his trajectory, we see Arturo Ui learning how to stand, how to move, and how to speak in a way that demands obedience; for the latter, he recites a speech from Julius Caesar. “This is exactly what happened,” Gatiss says of Hitler. “He went to see an actor. Most politicians do at some stage, to talk about voice and posture and rhetoric.” He recalls the time when Conservative leaders started standing with their legs unnaturally far apart. “They’d been told it was a power stance,” Gatiss says. “But it’s about trying to convince people.” When done well, he concedes, “it works”.

Warwickshire county council, which oversees the area where the RSC is based, is led by Reform UK. Though it is unlikely for there to be much crossover between those voters and RSC ticket-holders, Gatiss says, “I would like to think we are not just preaching to the choir.” He insists on being more practical about hope. “We are doing this,” he says of the play, “because we feel helpless.” The show’s epilogue, which calls on the audience to act against the rise of fascism, still gives Gatiss goosebumps. “I’m not suggesting someone’s going to walk in and tear up their Britain First membership in front of us, but you have to do something. Go down swinging, at least.”

The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 11 April to 30 May.