Review The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui

A World War II play written when Bertolt Brecht fled to the US is still a potent analysis of dictatorship, but Peter Barker wonders if a new adaptation's jokey approach and Trump analogy lessens its impact. 

The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui
by Bertolt Brecht  

Market Forces
https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/ 

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941 during wartime exile from Germany in the United Sates. Last year, we had the National Theatre's take on Brecht and Kurt Weil's 1920s' musical critique of capitalism, The Threepenny Opera. 

Now, after a new wave of crowd-pleasing demagogues and fake news has crashed on the shores of Western democracies, director Simon Evans and adaptor Bruce Norris have turned again to Brecht in an attempt to drew their own analogy with our times.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui presents fascism as gangster-like capitalism, with Lenny Henry in the title role. The play’s premise is easy to understand: it’s an allegory of the rise of the 20th century’s not-so-great dictator.

Market trader Ui is Hitler who, using and destroying the corrupt Cauliflower Trust, takes control. Among his henchmen and victims are Ernesto Roma (Giles Terera)  representing Hitler's ally and then rival Ernst Röhm. Givola (Guy Rhys) is Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Betty Dullfeet (Justine Mitchell) is Engelbert Dollfuß, assassinated Austrian Chancellor,  and  deceitful, profiteering Trust chief Dogsborough (Michael Pennington) is the Prussian junker president, Paul von Hindenburg.

The play catalogues the rise of  Ui and asks the question -- what should we do to stop history repeating itself, once more, as tragedy?

In fact, this staging poses that question to the audience very directly. There is a great deal of audience participation, with members co-opted to play arsonists, those assassinated, a rigged jury, a dead body, a framed innocent and other victims.

There are genuinely horrible, as well as horribly funny, moments; as Henry’s Ui is coached on diction and stance by an actor (Tom Edden), it is chilling to see how Ui picks up the gestures and stance of the Berchtesgarden bully. It is not at all subtle. It is a screaming political allegory repeated again and again and again.

And that is how it should be, in my opinion. Not comfortable, but something resembling a physical assault by a bully armed with a cosh and a knuckleduster.

This production achieves that punch, to its credit. My only reservation is that this version of the play is a bit too much fun; it is almost too good-natured in places. Perhaps even, dare I say it, too English, needing more sourness and anger. The National’s Threepenny Opera last year had the same feeling about it -- it was too nice at times.

Henry as Ui leads the rest of the ensemble cast. He convinces at beginning as the slouching rough beast, who slyly takes a mile when barely an inch is offered and gives in return lies and violence. He also has bags of charisma.

The Donmar is transformed by Peter McKintosh’s intricate, detailed set into a Chicago speakeasy where the audience is seated on saloon chairs on all sides. It’s theatre in the round and a few chairs, benches and tables are used at various times for the different scenes.

Yet the production makes one serious mistake. It directly links Donald Trump and Hitler.

Many may see Trump as a liar, a bully, an incompetent, a misogynist, a racist, a narcissist, a demagogue, a chauvinist, a failed businessman, an evil spirit conjured up through media manipulation, a urophile  -- but he is not Hitler, and I don’t believe it aids public understanding of Trump to liken him to the Nazi dictator.

Perhaps there is a danger now that Trump has become too easy, and too often an inaccurate,  shorthand which in this case diverts attention from Brecht's bruising analysis of the circumstances which brought Hitler to power.

While not an unflawed production, this version of the Brechtian classic has an undoubtedly visceral Arturo Ui in Lenny Henry and merits a green light.

Review Clybourne Park

Guest reviewer Francis Beckett encounters simmering tensions and outrageous punchlines in a revival of a hit American play currently on tour.

 

Clybourne Park

By Bruce Norris

Race Up The Housing Ladder

http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/clybourne-park/richmond-theatre/

It's 1959 and middle-aged Chicago couple Russ and Bev plan to sell their home in middle-class Clybourne Park. 

They have never met the couple to whom they are selling when their neighbour, Karl, arrives to tell them that the family is black. Will they please reconsider the sale, for if it goes through, bang goes the neighbourhood?

It's fifty years later and act two. Many of Clybourne Park’s houses now have black owners. Yet Russ and Bev’s old house is again in the hands of a white couple who want to rebuild on a larger scale and are forced to negotiate their plans, sullenly, line by line, with their black neighbours.

That's the plot outline without giving too much away for those readers who didn't see the first UK production at The Royal Court Theatre in 2010.

For writer Bruce Norris is himself a past master in the art of withholding information until we are clamouring for it. His playwright's trick is simple but effective. Just when we are on the verge of a revelation - someone interrupts, with a delaying witless conventional piety.

From the opening moments, director Daniel Buckroyd's production from the Mercury Theatre in Colchester  is both painful and achingly funny. The forced jollity of Russ and Bev, as they try and squeeze what little life there is out of some very poor jokes masks, we later learn, a deep-rooted grief.

As Russ, Mark Womack gives an intelligent, carefully-judged performance supporting Rebecca Manley's dominant Bev – desperate, brittle, over-the-top.

We come to care about Bev and Russ, their courage and dignity in the face of hardship, despite our recognition of their instinctive racism imbibed with their mother's milk. 

Heartrendingly, Bev fails to comprehend the insult when she presses gifts on dignified and thoughtful couple,  black maid Francine (Gloria Onitri) and husband Albert (Wole Sawyerr).

“Ma’am, we don’t want your things, we got our own things.”

“Well, then, I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

Meanwhile, we could cheerfully throttle Ben Deery's hyperactive Karl every time he explains laboriously how he has nothing against black people, doesn’t believe they're inferior. It’s just that – oh, hell, you ever see a black person skiing? That's enough proof for him black folks want to be different.

The same cast re-emerge as a later generation of new characters in the second act. 

Now Gloria Onitiri's Lena is fluent and sophisticated. She brings protracted jousting, as to what constitutes a racially offensive joke, to a crashing end with her own devastating quip, unrepeatable not only because it would be a spoiler, but also too shocking even for my own North London dinner parties!

Billed as a drama about racism, it's more accurate to say it's one about race, the relationship between races, burdened and hobbled by history. A marvellous play, faultlessly performed. A green light and a recommendation to rush along and see this production while you can.