The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was presented in the round in Fitzpatrick Hall and was entered for the Sunday Times National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough.
The world was almost won by such an ape!
The nations put him where his kind belong.
But don't rejoice too soon at your escape -
The womb he crawled from is still going strong.
The rise to power of dictators and the problem of how to deal with aggressive rogue states has not gone away: on the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War it remains a curiously modern problem. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
Review:
What we might normally expect from good theatre and what Brecht often delivers are not one and the same thing. His brand of moralising politics usually runs contrary to our need for entertainment but in this brave new production, a satisfying synthesis between the political meat and the comedy veg is achieved.
Set amidst the economic turmoil of gangster controlled Chicago in the '30s, the play is a direct and thinly veiled attack on German apathy towards the threat of Hitler's rise to power and a warning to future generations. In this production, director Phillip Breen successfully strikes a balance between the ominous overtones of the Hitlerian episodes and the Chaplin-like caricatures and comedy moments of Brecht's grand style. Two years before Hitler's programmes of extermination, the dangers of his expansionist tendencies and his ruthless political ambition were already apparent to Brecht as he transposes Hitler's manipulation of the German and Austrian governments onto a gangster's attempts to take over the cauliflower trade in American cities. Initially dismissed as an uncouth upstart, the gangster Ui, like Hitler and Al Capone, uses a mixture of violence, incendiary speech and mesmerising rhetoric to further his mafioso promotion of brotherhood and blood-ties. Ui and his group of maniacal followers force their way into power, ruthlessly knocking off dissenters and critics and finally achieving support and recognition from the vegetable traders of Chicago and neighbouring city, Cicero.
In keeping with Brecht's ideas about didactic theatre and its need to alienate in order to educate, the play begins outside the auditorium while the actors wait inside to assume their roles. Using Queens' Fitzpatrick Hall innovatively, with an in-the-round stage, galleries and a podium on the raised stage for Ui's spectacular final speech, the Breen Team pull off another impressive and professional production. Certain scenes were terrific - the corruption of the law courts by the gangsters, represented by a revolving set where each revolution brought the Judge and the mob closer together, and a gangster killing in a darkened garage both stand out. Performances were universally excellent- true to the Brechtian ideal of the collective, no one could possibly be singled out for particular praise or criticism. However, it has to be said that Christian Coulson's eerily Tony Blair-esque delivery of Ui's mannerisms and speech added an unexpected contemporary resonance to the portrayal of a conniving, fascist dictator and his political harem.
To call this an excellent student production would not do it justice. This was simply excellent theatre; utterly absorbing and consummately professional.
