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.
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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”.