LJ Parkinson, Mark Gatiss and Mawaan Rizwan. Photo by Marc Brenner.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht – Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Sean Linnén’s revival of Brecht’s Arturo Ui could not be better timed. The play has seemed more apt to the times with every passing day since it was announced. With Mark Gatiss as Arturo, the RSC has pulled over a casting as well as a programming coup. There is a sense of excitement around this production, and it delivers in an evening of visual excitement and political chills.

Brecht mocks the Nazis by transporting their rise to a comic Chicago underworld, with shades of Bugsy Malone. There, shadow Hitler Arturo Ui rises to dominate the city’s cauliflower trade through threats and thuggery, before setting his ambitions on the entire USA. The American setting echoes differently with us now, as we live through the rise of a new 21st century American version of fascism. Linnén plays into the comedy, arming his gangsters with vegetables rather than weapons and creating an atmosphere of imminent farce throughout the evening. The play has a new soundtrack by Placebo, performed live by a house band perched on a podium (a reminder of the importance of live music, under threat at Stratford). Their music drives the show forward, building momentum and becoming more ragged as events accelerate and Arturo gains power.

Mark Gatiss is very watchable as Ui, capable of being both pathetic and deeply sinister. Dressed unashamedly as Hitler, he wheedles his way into the orbit of tortured politician Dogsborough, the cypher for German President Paul von Hindenburg (a moving performance from Christopher Godwin), before using his associates to force him into doing what he wants. As he gains influence, he seems to gain physical presence, until he looms over the stage addressing the city from a platform. Gatiss is repulsive and chilling, but recognisably very human.

The most difficult aspect of the play is giving individuality to characters who are essentially allegorical types, while also giving full reign to their outrageous, appalling behaviour. The cast does a fine job. Kadiff Kirwan as Roma, chief gangster and Erich Röhm analogue, bring a sense of tragic betrayal to a character who is unredeemably nasty. The decision to cast Maawan Rizwan as both lead gangster Gigi and the compere works well, as his Cabaret-style rabble-rousing blends into psychopathic prancing around the stage, wearing hats taken from his murder victims. LJ Parkinson is his gleeful accomplice, Girola. Janie Dee is understated, as the defence lawyer among other parts, in a way that shows how decency, lawful behaviour is overwhelmed by aggressive, stage-stealing populists.

The show is a visual treat, with sets and costumes by Georgia Lowe, who dresses the cast in cartoonish 1930s Chicago outfits. The band’s podium slides on an off stage, as they play on top, retreating to reveal new sets. These include Arturo in his bubble bath, a white coffin around which Gatiss and Dee play a Richard III-esque seduction scene over the body of her husband, and a courtroom with a bloodied defendant unconscious in the dock. The Night of the Long Knives is staged as a St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which Roma and his men are machine-gunned, writhing in slow motion and casting rose petals from their pockets for what seems like an impossibly long time. The evening is full of memorable tableaux.

Linnén shows the play to be as relevant as we might have feared. He resists temptations to make any direct comparisons with the Presidency of Donald Trump, rightly seeing that these comparisons make themselves. Brecht wrote Arturo Ui in 1941, but it was not staged until 1958, by which time it had acquired an epilogue reflecting the post-Nazi perspective. It has always, therefore, been a play about fighting future fascism, and the Resistible in the title is rallying call. As such, Mark Gatiss final lines: “The bitch that bore him is in heat again” is a direct warning about times that we are now living through. Staged in a county now run by a Reform council, this production gives the RSC a much-needed voice in the battle with regressive values that threatens to consume the world.