Latest news with #BertoltBrecht
Telegraph
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Starmer's ‘synthetic voters' show Downing Street's lost the plot
In 1953 the communist government of East Germany was grappling with widespread unrest. It blamed the German public for not being appreciative enough of its political leadership. 'Would it not be simpler,' responded the playwright Bertolt Brecht, 'if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?' Brecht was joking, of course. But the sentiment came to mind when considering Labour's current approach to artificial intelligence (AI). The Spectator magazine reported this week that No10 is 'experimenting with 'synthetic voters' – fake focus groups of AI chatbots, who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. Instead of us telling the Government what we think, chatbots will ventriloquise on our behalf. The initiative is said to be the brainchild of the Prime Minister's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and, as this column noted last year, it is being championed by one of his predecessors, Dominic Cummings. A pioneer in this new field of synthetic voters is Ben Warner, the data guru who was a special adviser to the government between 2019 and 2021. Think of him as the Benji Dunn to Cummings' Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible. As Cummings enthused last year, with AI you could test your policy or message on synthetic voters and get feedback quickly and cheaply. Political advisers could ask a special AI chatbot what we think, and get an answer in seconds. No need to commission costly national polls or convene time-consuming focus groups. Underpinning today's AI chatbots are large language models, statistical predictors that are fine-tuned mimics. They have ingested vast amounts of other people's thoughts and creative work, and can generate a pastiche of them on demand. The hope is that this pastiche is now good enough to augment or even replace the responses of real human beings. '[If] you compare the output of that to an actual focus group transcript of people, most people can't tell the difference between the two,' claimed Cummings. Warner is doing just that in a new venture called Electric Twin, which says that it can capture the messy nuance of humanity with reliable precision. 'Our synthetic populations are carefully crafted simulations of real-world populations,' Electric Twin explains on its website. Its models 'see and engage the fragments, the outliers and the disenfranchised. They understand the misunderstood'. 'We think this is an exciting technology with huge benefits for the public sector and think it is great if No10 is experimenting with this technology,' Warner told me, though he said Downing Street was not using Electric Twin but some other technology. Downing Street didn't respond to a request for comment. Alas, synthetic voters may simply be making a problem worse. The chief critique of Sir Keir Starmer is that he is out of touch. Hiding behind a computer screen is unlikely to dispel that image. 'Societies feel unknowable … leaders and teams are frequently blindsided,' Electric Twin's website asserts. Forty years ago, that wasn't a problem. Politicians such as Thatcher, Healey and Foot revelled in open public hustings. They weren't scared of hearing what we thought. But political advisers became wary of their candidates making gaffes, and became obsessed with cosmetic presentation. Focus groups were a sign that the political class had lost confidence in its own ideas, or maybe even run out of them. Once MPs retreated behind a wall of consultants, no wonder the public became a mystery. With AI, the consultants have simply contrived a paid-for solution to a problem they created. However, it is difficult to see how the chatbots can help. The AI model can only be trained on what has already been said and written, so cannot originate authentic responses to new political ideas. For example, there is no corpus of public reaction to the idea that illegal immigrants to the UK should be sent to the Falkland Islands, for that idea has never been advanced. 'No doubt Starmer would prefer to inhabit a world in which an AI synthetic focus groups showed he and his policies were loved by the populace,' says the author Ewan Morrison, whose new dystopian thriller For Emma probes the post-human fantasies of the giant technology companies. 'The most dangerous thing is not that these AI surrogates develop some vast superintelligence, but that we lower ourselves to their level, becoming dependent on technologies that are riddled with inaccuracies,' he thinks. 'Today's AI is a synthetic slop information generator, so any government that incorporates this flawed technology will hit trouble.' Cummings, in his promotion of the concept last year, became visibly excited by extending the idea even further. He muses how chatbots could generate targeted videos aimed at specific demographics. He starts to say such an idea would be 'science fiction', but stops himself. This is rather a giveaway. Much like his determination to put giant data dashboards into Whitehall and turn the Government into a sci-fi control room, it's the ultimate fantasy of the consultant class to become the controller of our destiny, a mini master of the universe. But it's a very sterile view of the world in which we are not humans, just data to be filtered and processed. Why are Labour and Cummings so obsessed with this science fiction fantasy of AI as the solution to all their problems, following a script written by Silicon Valley? Maybe because, to paraphrase another poet and dramatist TS Eliot, the modern politician cannot bear very much reality.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ute Lemper Still Sings Songs of Rebellion. The Stakes Are Still High.
'Welcome to Weimar — to the year 2025,' Ute Lemper announced. The German-born singer and actress was greeting friends and colleagues who had squeezed into the Birdsong Society's small headquarters by Gramercy Park to hear her perform songs from her latest album, which celebrates Kurt Weill, a composer Lemper has championed for four decades. Sliding into the album's title number, 'Pirate Jenny,' Lemper got even closer to a listener who had been standing just a few feet away, fixing him with a snarling grin. Featured in 'The Threepenny Opera,' the most celebrated of Weill's noted collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the tune has been covered by artists from Nina Simone to Judy Collins. It's also the only standard written from the perspective of a hotel maid waiting for a ship of pirates to arrive and, at her behest, murder all the guests. 'It's a song about revolution and rebellion,' Lemper explained in an interview before the event. The singer is less intimidating in conversation than she is when channeling bloodlust. She'll turn 62 in July, and with her long, lean frame and impossibly high cheekbones, she still projects the cool beauty of a runway model. Lemper was perceived as something of a rebel herself, at least in her native country, when Decca Records released 'Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill' in 1988. The album, which evolved from 'a little fringe record I made in Berlin' a couple of years earlier, earned Lemper an international fan base — with one notable exception. 'The Germans hated it,' Lemper recalled. 'They weren't interested in speaking about the past.' Decca's chief executive at the time, Roland Kommerell, German himself, had started a project dedicated to bringing back music that had been banned under the Nazis, including classical symphonies and Weimar-era cabaret songs — music composed by Jews who were persecuted or, like Weill, forced into exile. 'It was a huge chapter to rip open; it was still bleeding at the time,' Lemper said. 'And suddenly, I was in the position to have to respond to hundreds of journalists about this music. I became almost the representative of my generation, the Cold War generation, in Germany.' Lemper lived for a while in Paris and in London, where she starred in the Brecht- and Weill-inspired musicals of John Kander and Fred Ebb, winning an Olivier Award for her portrayal of the merry murderess Velma Kelly in 'Chicago,' a role she also played on Broadway. Since 1998 she has called New York home; she currently resides on the Upper West Side with her second husband, the musician Todd Turkisher. Turkisher played percussion on 'Pirate Jenny,' which also features 'Mack the Knife,' 'My Ship,' 'Speak Low' and 'Surabaya Johnny.' Co-produced by David Chesky, Turkisher's frequent collaborator, and Lemper, the tracks wrap her pungent, dramatically astute vocals — applied through the years to the words and music of artists as diverse as Jacques Brel, Philip Glass, Nick Cave and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda — in Chesky's atmospheric, often eerie arrangements. The album sprang from a conversation Lemper had last year with Chesky, who released it on his label, the Audiophile Society. Lemper pointed out to Chesky, also a composer, that 2025 would be the 125th anniversary of Weill's birth. 'And he said, 'you should do something different. Let's make it more accessible for a new generation, with a groovy component, but without watering down the strength of the stories.'' In an email exchange, Chesky wrote, 'Ute owns this genre of Weill material; she understands the world of Brecht and Weill better than anyone I have ever encountered. But I proposed to her, what if we took these classic songs and set them in this dark, late-night, Berlin cabaret vibe, while using the electronic language of today's music? Then you have versions that still honor the songs but have a more direct connection to today's world.' Adrienne Haan, another German-born, New York-based singer who has won acclaim performing a range of international material, including Weill's songs, was a teenager when she first discovered Lemper. In a phone interview, Haan, 47, said she had been influenced by many artists who recorded from the 1920s through the '50s, 'but Ute was much closer to my age, and she was such a strong interpreter. There was a certain steel in her voice, and I found it fascinating that someone from Germany, from the generation above me, could make it in America.' A prolific live performer, Lemper will trace Weill's life and songbook on May 27 and 29 at the Manhattan cabaret venue 54 Below. The engagement follows one earlier this month at Neue Gallerie, where she presented another favorite program, 'Rendezvous With Marlene,' based on a three-hour phone conversation she had in the late 1980s with another German woman known for denouncing Hitler: Marlene Dietrich. Lemper had written Dietrich, then in her late 80s, 'to apologize' for comparisons that had been drawn between them, 'and to thank her for the inspiration she had given to generations of women,' she said. 'Marlene was a woman ahead of her time; she raised the gender question 100 years ago — she was bisexual, she dressed like a man,' she added. 'And she became an American citizen and fought against the Nazis, entertaining troops on the front lines. She wanted to go home later, but the Germans thought she was a traitor.' Attentive to history's darker recurrences as well as its nuances, Lemper is wary of certain comparisons that have been made involving President Trump. 'There is only one Hitler,' she said, but called the current moment a 'new chapter,' that is 'really worrisome' in no uncertain terms. Lemper has also been interested in expressing herself more through songwriting. In 2023 she released 'Time Traveler,' consisting entirely of original material, as well as a memoir in German with the same title, 'Die Zeitreisende' — featuring an epilogue by her daughter, Stella, who just earned her master's degree in creative writing at Columbia University. 'I had already published a memoir when I was 30,' Lemper mused. 'An East German publisher asked me to write it, because so much had already happened with my career, and living through the fall of the Wall.' She hopes the new book, which has been translated into Italian, can also be made available in English: 'I incorporated tales from those times, and obviously followed that up with more decades of life and motherhood and ups and downs. I so appreciate aging. I would never want to turn the wheel back — except maybe for a little less backache, and a new hip.' Lemper is considering a replacement, but only when she can find time in her schedule — which this spring alone has also included a German revival of a staging of Brecht and Weill's 'The Seven Deadly Sins,' which she first performed in more than three decades ago. 'We're going to take it to Paris next year, and then London,' she said. 'I still have more to give, and I have to give it at every performance. The more you give, the more you have.'
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mother Courage and her Children review – wartime profiteering rarely sounded so good
The noise is constant. It is in the eight marimbas lined up across the stage, which add a South African bounce to Bertolt Brecht's 1939 epic of the thirty years' war. It is in the operatic songs, all lush harmonies and pulsing percussion. And it is in the vocal effects of the large cast, adding birdsong or insect rhythms to the battlefields. Sometimes it is in the crackle of a plastic bottle to suggest fire, the shuddering boom of a drum to indicate an execution, or the grind of hands across metal for machine-gun fire. All of it is generated by the actors, much like the set, by the ensemble with Janet Brown and Eve Booth: a resourceful collection of corrugated iron, wooden pallets, old tyres and buckets. It gives Mark Dornford-May's production an in-built theatricality: each performance created anew. But suddenly the noise stops and the silence is piercing. The moment comes when Paulina Malefane's no-nonsense Mother Courage faces her greatest threat. With heavy irony, it is not the conscription of her first son (Brodie Daniel), the execution of the second (Joseph Hammal), nor even the rape and mutilation of her daughter (Noluthando Boqwana-Page). All those she regards as the cost of doing business; collateral damage in the pursuit of profit as she buys and sells from the back of her cart to the highest military bidder. No, what sucks the air out of her is the outbreak of peace. No war, no trade, no noise. The respite is temporary, of course. Neither war nor capitalism can rest for long. But the icy silence is a highlight of a gutsy production, filleted down to an economical 90 minutes by playwright Lee Hall, who translated the play for Shared Experience in 2000, and marking the welcome debut of Ensemble '84, a company drawn from the environs of Horden, a former mining village in County Durham overlooking the North Sea. In collaboration with Johannesburg's Isango Ensemble, the actors are forthright and physical, building a sense of community not just in the makeup of the newly formed company but in the implication that war, like money, draws every one of us helplessly in. At Horden Methodist Church until 24 May
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Brecht's answer to Beckett's question
The question posed by Andy Beckett (What if one key problem with British politics at the moment is us – the voters?, 16 May) was answered with sharp irony by Bertolt Brecht in his poem Die Lösung (The Solution): 'Would it not in that case / Be simpler for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?'Derrick CameronStoke-on-Trent Thames Water's chair, Sir Adrian Montague, argues for bonuses up to 50% of senior managers' salaries, because they are its 'most precious resource' (Report, 15 May). Some of us would say that water is their most precious resource, and should not be in the hands of rule-breaking, profit-seeking TreagusManchester Thames Water's executives want Ofwat to refrain from fining the company for its failings (Nils Pratley on finance, 13, May). Perhaps instead, the overpaid executives themselves should be issued with massive fines for their failings? It might just concentrate their minds a bit GreenIpswich Our football-mad German step-grandson, aged seven, came to stay recently, travelling in one of his many souvenir shirts, a West Ham one. 'Is someone forcing you to wear that?' asked the border official (Letters, 13 April).Karen AdlerNottingham Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
New York Times
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Most Divisive Restaurant in London Is Open Only for Lunch
The Yellow Bittern, an 18-seat restaurant and bookstore near King's Cross station, hardly looks like the most divisive lunch spot in London. It feels more like the farmhouse of a retired professor: Customers ring a bell to enter, then hang their coats on pegs by the door, while pots of Irish stew simmer in the tiny open kitchen. The food is hearty and hot, served with open jars of mustard. The décor includes books on Bertolt Brecht and an accordion. But the cooking and ambience are not the only reasons that London's top restaurant critics, chefs and gourmands have come to dine and opine. Many are curious for a taste of the controversy swirling around its head cook, Hugh Corcoran, a deeply read communist and vocal Instagrammer who managed to enrage half the city soon after the Yellow Bittern opened in October. 'I've arrived at dinner parties or meals with people and then we all say, 'Shall we discuss the Yellow Bittern?'' said Margot Henderson, the chef of Rochelle Canteen in East London and a pioneer of modern British cooking. 'It's the talk of the town.' Much of that talk boils down to issues of class, as it so often does in Britain. The Bittern is cash-only and open for two seatings, at noon and 2 p.m., only during the workweek. Detractors have noted that few Londoners can partake in a leisurely, multicourse midday meal with a bottle of wine, and fewer still can justify one that easily costs $300 for a group of four. And the suggestion that they could — coming from a man with a larger-than-life drawing of Vladimir Lenin in his restaurant — has set off a yowl of irritation. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
