RSC: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht

When Mark Gatiss wipes the black toothbrush moustache from his face and says the following lines, I assume that they have been added on by this director, given the world that we live in today:

If we could learn to look, instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce.
If only we could act, instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
This is the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world has stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.

(https://wist.info/brecht-berthold/46336/)

But apparently not. Bertolt Brecht wrote the play in 1941 during the height of Hitler’s power – this epilogue (in German – the above is one translation) was added just after the war.

The whole play is an allegorical satire on the rise of Hitler from the point where he was a small-time thug to the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria). It uses clownish Chicago gangsters from the 1930s and dodgy trading in cauliflowers to create a comedy that becomes increasingly grotesque as we witness the spiralling descent into the Fascist endgame. To accompany each scene there is a sign at the top of the stage to explain the parallels with what had happened in Nazi Germany. This was useful, and again I thought that it was a modern addition, but it looks like Brecht had wanted to get his message across clearly and was into using all the means at his disposal. 

For example, just as Shakespeare often had prologues that lay out the whole plot, spoilers and all, this play does the same, with an announcer introducing the main hoodlums one by one and describing, in tripping verse, what is about to take place. Why do that you may ask. Because it’s a story that we all know already. The point is not what will happen. The point is to see what has happened, and just how ludicrous it all is. 

It is a farce to a degree and many parts of it are played for laughs. Initially, the gangster’s weapons consist of corn-on-the-cob sidearms and brussels sprout stalk rifles. Gatiss’s Arturo Ui has got brilliant make-up. Alongside the wipeable tache, his cheekbones are painted to look gaunt, and the rims of his eyes are red. His hair has the greasy flop fringe that is very Hitleresque. He plays the role with a physicality which is lizard-like and menacing. His neck cricks and tongue flicks would give Voldemort a run for his money. There is an excellent scene where Arturo gets lessons on comportment from a Shakespearean actor that his thugs have kidnapped. The actor wears the yellow stockings of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and he gets the previously slouching Arturo to stand up tall and walk exaggeratedly landing on his toes, just as Malvolio does for Olivia, when he shows off his cross-garters. Gatiss copies him and we see this silly, prancing walk turn into the goose step and our laughter is checked a little (Hitler really did get acting lessons for his public appearances).

All the actors are very good in this performance, but I thought that Mawaan Rizwan, playing Giri (mapped on to Hermann Göring) really stood out. He was also the ‘announcer’ at the beginning wearing an RSC red jacket and he got the whole audience attending to him with his smile and his slightly insane looking eyes. As Giri, he looked like a cross between the Emcee in the musical ‘Cabaret’ and one of the ‘droogs’ in ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

The music, by an in-house band sitting atop a rolling square tent, has been composed by the band ‘Placebo’. I didn’t realise they were still going, but their signature heavy guitar swirls overlaid onto the building tension perfectly. I remember dancing to ‘Pure Morning’ in my student days, and I think I need to go back and listen to some of their stuff again.

If you get the chance to see this play while it’s on, then I highly recommend it. The didactic signposting does not detract for me but serves as an excellent reminder of just how easily dictatorships can be allowed to happen, when we allow greed, fear and bigotry to grow and take us over.