THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Bertolt Brecht, translated by Stephen Sharkey
RSC Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon until May 30, 2026
www.rsc.org.uk/the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-ui
“The play used to be a warning from history but now it’s just the news” said Mark Gatiss in an interview for his RSC debut here in Brecht’s classic. He hits the nail on the head.
The play, which famously parodies the rise of Hitler through the figure of a 1930s Chicago gangster looking to seize control of the vegetable business by ruthlessly disposing of the competition, really doesn’t age well despite its obvious ‘warning from history'.
A satirical parable, it focuses on the mechanisms that enabled Hitler’s rise to power, as opposed to the anti-Jewish hatred underpinning it, and so serves today as an indictment of allowing the power-hungry to go unchecked. That’s fine you might say, when the daily news is a constant reminder of our own slippery slope, but this text is just too callow to be a modern day warning against the collapse into fascism. Today’s autocrats (do you need a list?) are much more subtle than Hitler had to be. They steal upon the body politic in the night such that the damage is done before people have woken up. Look at Orban’s techniques for example. No jackboot is really required when you slowly rewrite the constitution, rig elections, take over the courts, hobble the media by having your friends buy them up, and set up a superstructure of grift that keeps it all running.
Apart from the warning, the other excuse for reviving this is to give a new generation a taste of Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’ and his ‘distancing effects’. They’re all present and correct, if a little muted – the lights rarely go down, signs are held up directing the audience what to do and think, beaten up characters in court scenes bear title cards round their necks, and the whole thing is pitched at a high volume using a score from the acclaimed alt-rock band Placebo (Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal). A four piece on-stage band perform the rousing soundtrack. There is a great narrator or ‘barker’ too - the intensely charismatic writer/stand-up Mawaan Rizwan, who doubles up with menacing zeal as Giri, the most sadistic of the gangsters.
Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, as he dubbed it, is rendered with fantastic costumes from Georgia Lowe, fusing Weimar and ‘30s Chicago with modern cartoon and circus motifs and producing a wonderfully lurid extravaganza of pinks and purples that at times feels like an anarchic circus. But director Seán Linnen (in his RSC debut), in trying to balance the ‘epic’ with the accessible, ends up falling between two stools such that the piece wavers, and too often there is a lack of any real emotional jeopardy.
Gatiss, who is utterly compelling in the lead, often leans towards naturalism, as if to cut through the hubbub and appeal to our emotions rather than our intellect (a sin for Brecht), but this results in him at times seeming like he’s in a different production. The great Janie Dee, who plays four characters, also falls into this trap but nevertheless manages to bring emotional weight to her roles. The whole ensemble is remarkable in that they double and triple up in the roles. The first successful production of it at the Berliner Ensemble in 1959 ran 15 years and no doubt had a huge cast.
Gatiss succeeds in making Ui both pathetic and terrifying at the same time. He begins looking like a reptilian vagrant that people would swerve round in the street, but soon the confidence grows and by the end he’s in perfectly tailored full fascist regalia. As with Hitler the public persona was a carefully constructed, rehearsed, performance to make up for his inadequacies. In a witty scene he enlists the help of an old English ham actor (Christopher Godwin) to coach him on how to walk, stand and sit.
In all it’s a bold spectacle but I’m still dubious about what it can say to us today, apart from the obvious.
