Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” is a “slight play, perennially unloved”, said Houman Barekat in The New York Times. But when it is staged with conviction and daring theatrical élan – as in this terrific revival at the RSC – it works a treat.
Written in 1941, but not performed until 1958, it is a parable about Hitler’s rise to power, set in Chicago, where gangsters are operating a vegetable racket. Director Seán Linnen has imbued his staging with a “lurid, burlesque aesthetic, blending menace and absurdism”. And as Ui, the small-time racketeer who bribes and bullies his way to ascendancy, Mark Gatiss is skin-crawlingly brilliant, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. He delivers a truly “hypnotic” performance.
When this play was last revived in the UK in 2017, with Lenny Henry in the lead role, it really “hammered home” the parallels with the rise of Donald Trump, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Mercifully, there is almost none of that here. Just once, Gatiss slips into Trump’s distinctive tones – and though he earns “sniggers of recognition”, the moment “feels redundant”. “You have already made the connection to the comic grotesquery of our current world.” It is “the smallest of blips in an otherwise magnificent” production.
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Brecht’s plays can so easily “tip into wooden didacticism”. But this spectacular, high-octane staging – with music by Placebo adding a “thumping rock’n’roll energy” to the circus-like proceedings – is seductive and menacing. Brecht’s play has been likened to Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”, and there is something decidedly “Chaplinesque” in Gatiss’ unnerving transition from the “tragicomic” to the “truly terrifying”.
This is not the kind of show where you can pat yourself on the back for “getting it”, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Linnen’s “carnivalesque” revival really leans into the “awful charade of it all”. It benefits from a fine supporting cast, who have “fun with the gangsterisms”, and excellent design from Georgia Lowe. As for the terrific Gatiss, wait for his last line – a chilling point, powerfully made.
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 30 May
