Introduction

The script we are presenting below is one of four different scenarios from Violence & Learning by Henrik Bromander and John Hanse, which was performed at the International Brecht Society's Symposium in Oxford in June 2016.

The learning play Violence & Learning has been developed and performed in the context of left-wing activism in Sweden. The different variants of the play have partly been played out and developed in theater houses, but mainly in social centers, squatted buildings and other places of importance for the left-wing movement. This movement is also examined and discussed in the performance. Every performance has been followed by an open discussion, which aimed at being a starting point for further discussions—discussions that have been beneficial for us when gathering more material, and even changing the script for the next performance. The focus of these discussions has varied a lot depending on the place and the participators.

The starting point of the project and the structure of the play is inspired by Die Maßnahme (The Decision) by Bertolt Brecht. The idea is to make the participants, alongside the actors, reenact a number of fictional events such as a strike, a riot, and a blockade—all are of great material and symbolic value for the contemporary radical left. In a similar way that the police officers prepare themselves for crowd control (not only through lectures, but also by setting up and playing out scenarios), we can prepare ourselves physically for a discussion about political means and ends. We want to examine the embodied knowledge that is inherent in a certain action or situation, and in a larger context understand the tacit knowledge of a political practice or a social movement. The opportunity to move from the role of a bystander to the role of a participant, and vice versa, facilitates the possibility to scrutinize the political action itself. On a more general level, the performance enables a theoretical discussion about organized political practice.

Our main objective is that the performance should be a relevant part of the discussion about political means and ends in grassroots political movements, thus enabling the participants to examine and experience the political movement they are a part of from both a micro and macro perspective.

Some of you may be familiar with Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Having Philip. But only if you are Bohemian. Or Moravian. That's the Czech translation of The Importance of Being Earnest. You can imagine the dilemma facing the translator: there isn't a Czech word with the twin meanings of “Earnest”—but there is a Czech expression “to have Philip” which means to be serious. It's a curious solution, but I have great sympathy with the translator. After all, a translator has to resolve all difficulties somehow: it isn't really possible to leave a gap. Which means, among other things, that a translator has to read the original very carefully and know precisely what's going on.

I’m going to comment on Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar from the perspective of translation, in the hope of casting light on two fundamental questions: why has it taken sixty years for a translation of this work to be available in English, and what was Brecht trying to do? Could his aims, or rather a negative perception of them by particular commentators, explain this delay? It should be borne in mind that the act of translating permeates this work in a variety of ways: Brecht translated Latin terms into German, which have now been translated into English, and there is also the historical translation from the conditions of ancient Rome to 1930s Germany (and to our time).

The novel features a narrator who journeys to the home of Caesar's former banker, Spicer, twenty years after Caesar's death in the hope of obtaining a diary kept by Caesar's secretary slave, Rarus: the narrator wants to write a biography of his idol, the “great man.” The majority of the novel consists of extracts from this diary, framed by sections “in the present” in which Spicer provides the narrator with explanations of the period covered by the diaries, and there are brief conversations between the narrator and individuals who also knew Caesar: a former legionary, a lawyer, and a poet.

At one part of his diary Rarus describes a mob attacking Caesar's house (he always refers to Caesar as “C”):

This volume of the Brecht Yearbook features a selection of papers given at the Fifteenth Symposium of the International Brecht Society at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, that took place from June 25 to 29, 2016. It is perhaps worth noting that an event that opened a mere two days after the United Kingdom narrowly voted to leave the European Union offered a model of international cooperation and exchange. The political isolationism and the emotive arguments that seem to have won the day for the Brexiteers would surely have given Brecht, the perennial collaborator, cause for consternation. And, as ever, Brecht can furnish a suitably contradictory commentary from his poem of 1954, “Böser Morgen”: “Unwissende! schrie ich / Schuldbewußt.” (A bad morning: There are things you don't know! I cried. / Knowing I was guilty.)

The theme of the symposium, “Recycling Brecht,” very much traded on the ambiguity of the phrasing in English. “Recycling” is both an activity applied to one of the twentieth century's most productive artists and a description of the notorious recycler himself. Recycling was, in turn, understood in a number of ways. Some speakers discussed the straightforward re-use of material, while others took the term more literally, considering how something already used and used up could gain fresh utility by being taken apart and refunctioned, itself a very Brechtian modus operandi. The organizers were pleasantly surprised that a term that was originally intended as a way of attracting many and varied contributions proved useful in itself as a focus for sophisticated and ingenious interpretations of the recycling process.

We received a broad range of responses to the call for contributions. Brecht's legacy in the theater, in poetry, and in thought regularly figured in the proposals, as well as Brecht's penchant for engaging with all manner of sources in all manner of ways. In the former category, a remarkable number of panels discussed and explored Brecht's international presence, not only in his native Europe, but also in the other four continents. The breadth of reuse was considerable and revealed as much about Brecht as it did about the cultural traditions that engaged with him. In the latter category, the coincidence of the Fifteenth Symposium and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death produced two diverse panels on the relationship between the two playwrights, while others considered Brecht's recycling practices as novelist, playwright, and theorist.

As has been widely noted, social media has played a central role in the series of protests and uprisings that has swept the Maghreb and Middle East since 2010. In the regions whose political regimes often exerted complete control of the official news outlets, the spread of information and communication among the millions of participants in these events was made possible by the various products of the ongoing digital revolution. The graffito “twitter” sprayed onto the wall of a building in Cairo's Tahrir Square—featured in the documentary project this article will discuss in relation to Brecht's concepts and techniques—can serve as a synecdochal testimony to the relevance of new technologies to what the West refers to as the Arab Spring.

Presumably on account of Egypt's position as the largest Arab country and the longevity of Hosni Mubarak's rule, his ouster received more global resonance than any other event in the series, as confirmed by the volume of commentary that the January 25 revolution has generated. The John P. Robarts Research Library catalogue search I conducted on September 10, 2016, using the phrase “Arab Spring” in combination with the names of five countries where the wave of demonstrations and protests manifested itself most forcefully (Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen), yielded the following results: Egypt—144 books and 5418 articles; Libya—72 books and 3617 articles; Syria—79 books and 3826 articles; Tunisia—91 books and 3672 articles; Yemen—42 books and 1991 articles.

Mubarak had not yet been ousted when the American journalist Jigar Mehta and Egyptian software developer Yasmine Elayat joined creative forces to launch 18 Days in Egypt, a web platform where documents of the revolution could be posted, consisting of streams that combined text, images, and sound. The democratic expression of the Egyptian people's political will was thus to receive a creative analogy in the shape of a work based on the Internet's decentralized, uncensored, and widely accessible nature. Already the combination of the work's novel form and topical subject evoke Brechtian aesthetic predilections, but a closer analysis reveals more profound affinities and differences alike.

I refer to 18 Days as a “project” to suggest both its status as a work in progress and the impossibility of defining it in terms of a single medium.

John Willett's 1964 translation of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt as “alienation” ties the term to labor theory and social relations while rendering less visible its association with early twentieth century Russian formalists such as Viktor Schlovsky, who proposed that a property of all art is to “make strange” our experience. Brechtian performance at its best interweaves both social and aesthetic defamiliarization. And in his extraordinarily careful study of performance in Yugoslavia, Branislav Jakovljević “makes strange” reductive historical narratives of midcentury artistic practices and of Yugoslavia's demise, in part, through reexamining “alienation” in its multiple valences. Alienation Effects roots shifts in “self-management”—as a historical collective labor practice and emergent technology of the individual— and ties these shifts to collective, institutional, and conceptual performance practices in post-World War II Yugoslavia.

Meticulous case studies embrace selected mass and micro-performances ranging from Youth Day festivals to artistic works that use the Yugoslav currency as canvas for commentary. Illustrations evoke performance aesthetics alongside the means of their circulation. Jakovljević weaves archival research (including political documents, conference papers, and exhibition photos), interviews, and his own memories with in-depth yet deftly synthesized framings of economic, cultural, and performance theory. He does so in lucid prose sparkling with dry wit and precise analogy. His argumentation can conjure a thunderstorm punctuating a private performance of Waiting for Godot in a Belgrade artist's studio while nuancing distinctions among humanist Marxist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern notions of alienation.

Jakovljević frames his study as an intervention in art historical and political narratives that position performance art's “social turn” within either dissident Eastern or critical Western European practice. He does so by offering Yugoslavia as a geographical and historical fulcrum point with 1968 at its center. Jakovljević carves out his argument with analytic lenses that embrace the work of art—as both object and process—addressing performance as a representational labor practiced within a set of cultural, political, and economic institutions. While not attempting to survey Yugoslavia's performance field, Jakovljević organizes his decade-by-decade study in three distinct periods rooted in shifts in self-management. Chapter 1, “Bodywriting,” focuses on Yugoslavia's departure from Soviet economics and artistry in the 1950s and early 1960s.

In India, the “people’s” theater movement grew out of the Progressive Writers’ Association, which was initiated in England in 1935 by Sajjad Zaheer, Mulk Raj Anand, and others. These writers attended the International Symposium of Writers for the Defense of Culture against Fascism, which took place in Paris in June 1935, where stalwarts like Maxim Gorky, André Gide, André Malraux, E. M. Forster, and Bertolt Brecht made massive pleas for the freedom of artistic expression. Inspired, these young Indians felt compelled to form an association of their own in India. Officially inaugurated in Lucknow in April 1936, it was named the All India Writers’ Association. Its manifesto stated:

We believe that the new literature must deal with the basic problems of our existence today—the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjugation. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and unreason, we reject as reactionary—all that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines institutions and customs, in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organize ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive.

Rapidly attracting a sizable following of Indian writers both at home and abroad, one of the founder members, Mulk Raj Anand, represented India on behalf of the new association at the second International Symposium held in Paris later in 1936. Once again, Bertolt Brecht was among those present. It is not known whether Anand personally met Brecht on this occasion, but it is not unlikely that Brecht's ideas made an impression on him, which he carried back to India and discussed in various literary forums.

Anand was a young writer, extremely interested in theater, which led him and others in the PWA to encourage those working in the theater to align themselves with the Communist Party and use theater to resist the threat of fascism. It was in these circumstances that the Indian People's Theater Association (IPTA) was born in 1943. Prioritizing the use of popular/folk culture in order to reach out to the masses, IPTA's focus was on educating both the urban and “rural” masses, arousing them to political awareness and action. Regarding itself as a “people's theater,” IPTA provided an alternative to the “Parsi Natak” kind of commercial theater that was prevalent, dismissing it as a capitalist enterprise.

Some see Shakespeare's tragedies as an aesthetic response to bad politics. This might have been part of what attracted Brecht to Shakespeare and to tragedy. Brecht turned to Shakespeare on and off during his career, as numerous and mostly short notes attest. But there were times when Brecht's studies of Shakespeare intensified, and these were times when Brecht struggled with how his own theater could respond to extreme changes in German politics. Shakespeare's approach to theater disrupts the tragic representation of historical narratives. Brecht detected elements of Verfremdung in this aspect of Shakespeare's tragedies and sought to recycle these components in his most experimental theater and in his own staging of Greek tragedy.

To illustrate this I will concentrate on two examples of Brecht's reception of Shakespeare: his notes on Macbeth in 1927 and his reading of Hamlet in 1948. In 1927 Brecht was writing the second phase of his Fatzer fragment, a play about four World War I soldiers who, under the guidance of Johann Fatzer, desert from the German army and attempt to live collectively in hiding while waiting for a revolution that they expect to end the war. In 1948 Brecht turned to Hamlet when he was directing his Antigone des Sophokles, to which he added a new prelude about two sisters who find out that their only brother has deserted from the German army and is about to be hanged by the SS. During the Weimar Republic, while working on Fatzer and again after World War II, while working on Antigone, Brecht turned to Shakespeare's tragedies to work through the political situations he found himself in. He studied and used tragedy to engage with contemporary history in ways that allowed him to hold onto the critical distance of epic theater, but still engage with violent aspects of history.

It was less Brecht, however, than Heiner Müller who turned to Shakespeare's tragedies in order to come to terms with irrational implications of historical events. Müller turned to Shakespeare in order to counter what he calls “Vereinfachung in Brecht” (simplification in Brecht). Like Brecht, Müller worked with Macbeth and with Hamlet. He also created a stage version out of Brecht's Fatzer fragment, and he wrote his own version of Macbeth.

This essay looks into ways Bertolt Brecht recycles and exploits what could be called “ludic thinking” in his play Schweik in the Second World War (Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg) and in his Stories of Mr. Keuner. The “ludic” is a significant term in that it does not denote something merely amusing, light, unserious, or escapist (“it is just a game”); it rather signifies a structure that through the categories of play, lightness, or amusement actually grasps seriousness, reality, and ethics par excellence. Ludic thinking does not resolve the paradox of playfulness and seriousness; it respects it. As essentially heteronomous thinking, it implies an order in which one is seriously playful, both engaged and distanced, but never fully identified with one's role or totally separated from it.

My aim here is first to explain the project of ludic thinking in its broader historical and systematic context. I will mainly flesh out the ideas of Donald Winnicott and Friedrich Nietzsche, who not only introduce the important duality of seriousness and playfulness in the ludic stance, but also show how playfulness nourishes maturity in human beings. Winnicott and Nietzsche also touch upon the ethical dimension of play that is crucial in the reflection on ludic thinking in Brecht, too. Second, I will elucidate the aspects of ludic thinking in Brecht by clarifying the characteristics of the Brechtian ludic agent. I will show how the rejection of “identification with” and “separation from” relates to ludic thinking and manifests itself in Brecht's texts on Schweyk and Mr. Keuner. I will pursue the question of self-distance and distance from social norms. Last, I will formulate more generally the kind of ludic approach Brecht uses in his works in the frame of his practices of recycling. I will concentrate on the understanding of the ludic agent, ludic distance, and ludic care as they together construct a basis for understanding the ethics of the playful attitude.

The Context of Ludic Thinking

Research into the concept of play and playfulness received increasing attention in the human sciences in the twentieth century. The structure of play seemed to offer answers to new intellectual challenges after the “failure of the big narratives” and the “flop of the project of a complete human emancipation.”When resorting to transcendental principles or universal narratives for describing human beings and their social interactions became impossible, new ways of human self-understanding were needed.

2016 marks not only the sixtieth anniversary of Bertolt Brecht's death, but also the sixtieth anniversary of the Berliner Ensemble's first visit to London, which had a catalytic effect on the development of political drama in Britain throughout the twentieth century. After early encounters with Brechtian theater practice from the 1930s onward, it is the year 1956 that marks “a clear starting point for the story of Brecht's reception and influence in Britain.” The Berliner Ensemble's productions, along with Brecht's writings, which were available in English from the mid-1960s onward, considerably influenced British playwrights and theater makers alike, “shak[ing]” British theater “out of [its] rooted complacency” and contributing to the creation of a vibrant political theater scene in Britain. Indeed, the postwar situation in Britain provided fertile ground for Brecht's ideas and generations of playwrights, among them John Arden, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill, have taken on his aesthetic and theoretical legacy to spur the development of leftist political theater. Significantly, Brecht's approach to theater has remained a major shaping force in British playwriting and has played a decisive part in “a social and political turn in theatre” that has revitalized contemporary drama at the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet, while Brecht has continued to represent a vital source of inspiration for British dramatists, fundamental interrogations into the forms and functions of political art in the wake of recent political and philosophical developments, culminating in postmodernist ideological relativism, the end of communism, and the increasingly all-encompassing power of globalization, have challenged traditional notions of political theater in general and of Brechtian Epic Theater in particular.

With an insistence on the continued relevance of Brecht's dialectical model of theater, this essay seeks to investigate the challenges of recycling Brecht for the contemporary British stage and to examine how, with what aims, and with what consequences playwrights in Britain have productively reinterpreted and developed Brecht's method since the 1990s. Critically engaging with Brecht's legacy in the light of the philosophical, political, and social transformations of the last decades, playwrights turn to the experiential as a way of both taking on Brecht's ideas and adapting them to the context of the twenty-first century.

I am an artist and filmmaker. I think of my work as a process of drawing timelines between past and present that might help us imagine a future against the grain of reactionary ideology. For me the best place to start is with fragments: ideas cut short; abandoned victims of forces beyond their control; forces of culture, politics, and economics.

I find myself drawn back to a certain time in history, roughly from the 1920s through the 1940s. I believe we can learn from the work of artists and filmmakers who attempted to communicate with a mass audience in a way that was both critical of the status quo and optimistic in that they wanted to show that things can be other than they are. It was during the economic crisis of 2008 that I started to think that Brecht's writing might help us understand what was going on. And it seemed to me here in the United States that the best place to look to him for guidance was in Los Angeles. As I researched his work in Hollywood, I became intrigued by his sketches for films that he had not been able to realize. One in particular caught my attention, A Model Family. Only a few typed notes and some scrawled notebook entries remain. One reads as follows:

A MODEL FAMILY

Brecht based his idea on an article in Life magazine from 1941, “A Model Family in a Model Home,” that describes how an Ohio farm family won a prize, a week in a model home at the state fair. The drawback was that the home was open to the public twelve hours a day. I felt that its themes, architecture as a representation of social and economic relations, surveillance, spectacle, and the commodification of family life resonated in our century.

Brecht's work in Hollywood has often been considered a failure. On the contrary, I would like to suggest that his ideas were merely lying in wait for us.

Collaboration

From the beginning of their collaboration in 1943 through to 1956, Paul Dessau was Brecht's most innovative and experimental musical collaborator. During Brecht's lifetime he provided the music for productions of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan), Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man), Herrnburger Bericht (Report from Herrnburg), Die Erziehung der Hirse (The Cultivation of the Millet), for the opera Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (The Condemnation of Lukullus), alongside dozens of songs and occasional pieces including what is purportedly the most-sung political song of the German Democratic Republic, the “Aufbaulied der FDJ” (Reconstruction Song for the Free German Youth). Dessau was also, through to his death in 1979, the most important avant-garde composer of the GDR; its leading practitioner of serialism; a noted composer of film music (not least for four documentary films of Andrew and Annelie Thorndike); and a mediator between East and West, bringing Luigi Nono, Hans Werner Henze, and others to East Berlin and arranging performances of their works. Some of his own compositions were suppressed or censored; he was a tireless supporter and protector of younger, experimental composers (including Friedrich Goldmann and Reiner Bredemeyer); and a longterm collaborator with Brechtian writers including Heiner Müller, Volker Braun, and Karl Mickel. Müller wrote in his obituary for the composer:

Er hielt für lernbar, was gebraucht wird… . Ich habe viel von ihm gelernt. Das Beispiel seiner Arbeitshaltung. Sie hatte den Ernst des Kinderspiels. Das die avancierteste Weise der Produktion ist, Arbeit auf höchstem Niveau, ein Vorgriff in das Reich der Freiheit.

Recycling

There is hardly a more appropriate theme than recycling—the stubborn return of the “same”—that exemplifies the fundamental gesture of culture and even more so of the theater. Almost the entire repertoire of art consists of repetition, copy, and variation. Shakespeare invented not a single one of his numerous subjects. Reading a modern guide to dramas can seem like leafing through an encyclopedia of mythology. Réécriture—rewriting—is the law of culture: quotation, not originality in terms of content. The theater in particular repeats, quotes, copies, frequently oscillating between pastiche and parody, preexisting themes, subjects, figures, the entire course of narrative events. Since this process crosses not only the boundaries of language but also those between cultures and genres, we are confronted with a sort of translation in the broadest sense of the term—Übersetzung as Über-Setzen, carrying over.

With the modelbook of the 1948 staging of his Antigone, Bert Brecht provided a further dimension to the productive quality of copying. It must be immediately obvious that to see the modelbook as a guide for slavish imitation is to misunderstand it completely. The model is to be treated with confidence; it lives on only through adaptation. From the perspective of language Brecht's adaptation of the Sophoclean tragedy is based on Hölderlin's translation. With unusual modesty Brecht chose the title The Antigone of Sophocles: A Version for the Stage after Hölderlin's Translation. From the perspective of content Brecht's adaptation is certainly a radical reinterpretation of the classical plot. Antigone became for Brecht a play about Hitler's fascism. Creon is called “my Führer.” Like Hitler, at the end he wants to take Argos down with him: “And it shall fall …” He indirectly kills his own child. For Brecht, Haemon is supposed to be Creon's weapon of war in the final hour, like Hitler's “generation of 1929.” Creon's hope for a final victory—“another battle”—is a deceptive illusion (and propaganda), just as it was for the Nazis. Here it is a question of the suicidal or suicidally inclined state. The real “attraction” of the Antigone play is rather “the role of violence in the breakdown of the state authority”—that is, something with little relation to the Sophoclean tragedy.

Karin Burk's monograph Kindertheater als Möglichkeitsraum is a welcome and inspiring investigation into Walter Benjamin's 1929 “Programm eines proletarischen Kindertheaters.” Benjamin's pedagogical manifesto was commissioned by Gerhard Eisler and Johannes R. Becher in cooperation with Asja Lacis for the Karl-Liebknecht Haus, headquarters of the Communist Party in Berlin. It was intended as the conceptual basis for a proletarian children's theater in Berlin, modeled on Lacis's work in Latvia and Russia. Against the background of today's reactionary pedagogical policies with their quantitative, product-, and competition-oriented goals, Benjamin's “Programm” has lost none of its radical and provocative appeal.

Burk extrapolates Benjamin's pedagogical manifesto through an investigation of the two main intellectual influences that shaped his writing of the “Programm”: Latvian theater director, pedagogue, actress, and critic Asja Lacis, on the one hand, and Bertolt Brecht, on the other. Her monograph is divided into three parts: the first is dedicated to Benjamin's exchanges with Asja Lacis between 1924 and 1929; the second turns toward Lacis's work as a director of a children's theater in Latvia and Russia and her background in Russian avant-garde constructivist theater; and the third part offers a detailed reading of Benjamin's “Programm,” which culminates in a comparison to Brecht's concepts of Gestus and the Lehrstück. Burk's explicit interest is in the “Programm” as the conception of a children's theater that creates a space of possibilities [Möglichkeitsraum], allowing children to experience the full range of themselves and the world around them according to their own measure, free of any ideology (8).

Part 1 of Burk's book traces Benjamin's connection with Lacis: their first meetings in Capri and Berlin in 1924, Benjamin's visit in Riga in 1925, their meeting in Moscow in 1926, and their final exchanges in Berlin in 1928–29. Throughout their shared history, Burk demonstrates Lacis's crucial role in Benjamin's turn toward an experimental and praxis-based communism, as well as her impact on his aesthetic developments. In their ongoing discussion, the street stands out as a crucial topos, one that appears in the jointly written essay “Neapel” via the notion of —“porosity,” in Benjamin's Einbahnstraße (dedicated to and written under the influence of Lacis in Riga), as well as in the essay on “Moskau” and the Moskauer Tagebuch featuring Lacis as a key protagonist.

The first event of the Recycling Brecht symposium took place on June 25, 2016 (the day after the Brexit vote result was announced) at Oxford's North Wall Arts Centre, with multi-award-winning playwright Tony Kushner in conversation with Brecht scholar Tom Kuhn.

Kuhn: It's not every day that you get to introduce the greatest English-language playwright since … (maybe) Pinter! But Tony is a man whose works demand superlatives of us. His great 1994 play Angels in America is one of those truly exceptional works which is—perhaps a little bit like the Threepenny Opera—always playing somewhere in the world. In fact if you have a private jet at your disposal, you’re just in time to set off for the second half at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg.

For that play Tony won a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, and then in 2013 a National Arts Medal from Barack Obama. His plays are extraordinary in the breadth of their intellectual and formal ambition, and in their political and moral passion. I wanted to say he's created a whole new theatrical language for a generation, but I think actually there are so few people who can tread in his footsteps and develop what he's done—who have either the writerly skills or the chutzpah to bring Angels to America or a Homebody to Kabul.

He's also a great Brecht fan—which is why he's here. He's translated The Good Person of Szechwan and adapted that and Mother Courage—the latter was of course a triumph on Broadway in 2006 with Meryl Streep.

We’re here to talk about Brecht, and the importance of Brecht for your work and in your work, but I can't resist first asking you what you make of the most recent political developments in this sad country of ours.

Kushner: What do you mean? [laughter] I arrived in London on Thursday night and turned on the news at my hotel to see if any of the referendum results had started to come in. And they started to come in around ten, but by eleven my eyes were … and I fell fast asleep. And somebody, one of the Tories, had just announced that it was going to be a very good day for Remain, and so I fell asleep feeling good and then woke up to horror.