The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui

Submitted by on 8 August, 2002 - 12:00

'The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui' by Bertholt Brecht, in a new translation by Andy de la Tour, directed by Phil Willmott, and playing until 24 August (2002) at the Bridewell Theatre, Bride Lane (off Fleet Street) London.

“There’s no spoon long enough to sup with you!”, Mayor Dogsborough shouts at Arturo Ui when Ui comes knocking on the door to blackmail him with guaranteed silence about Dogsborough’s corruption, in return for political support.

Dogsbourough’s puffed-up, morally upright pomposity is all the more ridiculous in the light of his leading the total capitulation of all the grocers in Chicago and the whole of the Cauliflower Trust.

The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is one of Brecht's best-known plays, a savage allegory of Hitler’s rise to power, in which Hitler is portrayed as a Chicago gangster endeavouring to seize the city’s fruit and vegetable rackets from top-dog Al Capone.

It is a strict allegory. The grocers represent the Ruhr junkers in Depression Germany. The Cauliflower Trust represents the big bourgeois layer of Ruhr industrialists, organised in a Trust to wield political clout, yet temporarily hamstrung by a lack of flow of capital. And Mayor Dogsborough is very obviously the Chancellor Hindenberg. Ui’s gangster mates, who jostle amongst themselves like sycophantic children to become Ui’s most favoured bonehead lackey, represent Hitler’s immediate circle of henchmen.

There is one extremely irritating thing about this production, and I think it is certainly a defect in the production of a Brecht play. Brecht’s plays are so morally propaedeutic in the introduction of their politically strident content that I found the addition of a statement about Hitler’s resemblance to Ui — at the beginning and the end, a “topping and tailing” effort — completely redundant. An allegory is precisely that — allegorical — and, in this play, so crystal clear, that this sledge-hammer interpretation rendered the performance really amateur. It was patronising for the audience.

There are, however, a couple of highlights in this production. Everyone in my row, including me, nearly fell off our chairs laughing at the scene where Ui consults a classically-trained actor for deportment lessons. He wants to learn how to get rid of his coarse bearing and rough speech. The actor, a drunk who teaches deportment as some kind of Shakespearian mercenary, just for drinks, remodels Ui’s speech, walking, sitting and oratory capabilities, practised over a scene from “Julius Caesar”. The play is worth seeing for this scene alone.

Another highlight moment: Ui and his mobsters are holding their first public rallies. Ui shouts his speech through a microphone, newly-made preacher to the beleaguered grocers of Chicago, shouts us down and into submission. Testimonies are sought about Ui’s “protection” services — at the wrong end of a revolver. Mayor Dogsborough is called up to the platform.

Frozen in fear, paralyzed by the thought that his corruption in the controlling shares of murdered Sheet’s shipyard will be publicly exposed then and there, he breathes into the microphone, causing a huge wave of feedback to drown out everything else. Absolutely hilarious. It was, for me, a breakthrough moment in bringing out the farcical quality of Hitler’s rise to power.

There was something very important missing from the dramatic execution of this political play. Brecht’s objective is to show a series of “causes” in the rise of Hitler, each of which is a snapshot of a moment in which people could just have rejected him, but conjoined one with the other, add up to a monumental inevitability in the creation of the beast.

For sure, the sheer force and violence used by the Ui coterie is a good presentation of Hitler’s coup and the abject lack of solidarity that could have stood up to it, the result of which in the play are the stupid private rages and cowardices of individual people faced with someone prepared to eliminate them if they resist.

However, the production needs to reassess this aspect of compulsion it stresses and emphasise much more heavily the strand of free and conscious complicity to be found in the psychology of Brecht’s characters if it is to be true to Brecht’s own line of thought. Because of that weakness in the interpretation, I think a socialist audience will be critical of this production, and with reason.
Score: 7/10
Reviewer: Melissa White

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 24/06/2005 - 10:16

i found this production as an accurate artisitc interpretation on brechts behalf of Hitler's rise to power. all the characters represtend the sterotype of who went before. i feel that although this play is based on actual events, for those who's german history lacks the intimate details the story very much stands up on it's own. I found the comic element very refresing espcially with regards to the historical context of the piece, brecht remained true to his ideals while writting this play keeping to his socioloist roots and considering the taboo topic he bsed his whole play on, i fully admire him for this

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