Manic and messianic

If you saw The League of Gentlemen when it first terrorised our screens at the turn of the millennium, you might have been faintly surprised to learn that Mark Gatiss — probably best remembered for playing the sinister butcher Hilary Briss in the show — has become one of Britain’s finest classical actors in the intervening quarter-century. He is a double Olivier award-winner who gave a particularly sublime performance a couple of years ago as a quivering John Gielgud in Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue. Now he returns to the RSC, no less, with a barnstorming lead turn in a new version of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. There’s every chance that he’ll be finding space for a third Olivier at some point, especially if the show transfers to London after an all-too-brief sojourn in Stratford. 

Arturo Ui might not be Brecht’s best play, but it is probably his most accessible, and thanks to its mighty star part it’s found favour with a range of major actors that have included Antony Sher, Henry Goodman and Lenny Henry in recent years, as well as the disparate likes of Al Pacino, Nicol Williamson and Leonard Rossiter. It’s certainly a role that attracts natural comics — why else would Griff Rhys Jones have taken it on? — but there’s a decided grimness to the humour here that means calling it “funny” might be overegging the pudding somewhat. Or, to adapt a metaphor that the play uses itself, polishing the cauliflower. 

Brecht wrote the play as a savage satire on Hitler while he was living in exile in New York in 1941. A savvy man, he fled his native Germany in 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire. The playwright saw the rivers of blood coming, and knew that a left-wing dramatist would be first against the wall as the Nazis came to power. However, an itinerant life as a freelance writer proved frustrating, and this frustration led him to write “the gangster play we know”, in which he depicted the rise of Hitler and fascism in allegorical terms. He created the character of the small-time Chicago gangster Arturo Ui, who schemes to take over the cauliflower racket in his city by ruthlessly rubbing out the opposition. If this includes those who have helped him achieve his current bad eminence, so be it. 

If you’ve ever struggled with stagings of Brecht that go heavy on ideas of alienation and, to be blunt, pissing off the audience in the process, then Seán Linnen’s blessedly accessible production will be a revelation. After an opening scene in which an actor (Mahesh Parmar, subbing in for an indisposed Mawaan Rizwan) addresses the audience about the real-life events on which the play is based — with a blessed amount of humour and irreverence, courtesy of Stephen Sharkey’s punchy, demotic translation — then we’re into the action proper, as we see Gatiss’s black-toothed, leering Ui climb the greasy pole to demagoguery, dispensing with anyone around him in the process. It’s nasty, funny (although the laughter swiftly dies in your throat) and, of course, timely. 

In fact, it’s this timeliness that turns the play from an entertaining and thought-provoking experience into a vital one. Arturo Ui is less a great play than it is a peerless star vehicle for a great actor. Most of the other characters barely register, although there is nice work from RSC veteran Christopher Godwin as Ui’s gentlemanly, bewildered predecessor Dogsborough (based on Paul von Hindenburg) and from the great Janie Dee in a range of roles that includes, most strikingly, Betty Dullfleet, the widow of the assassinated Dullfleet: a figure drawing inspiration from Engelbert Dollfuss and Richard III’s Lady Anne in equal part. But this is Gatiss-as-Ui’s show, and what a show it is. 

It’s possible to raise trifling objections to some of his and Linnen’s conception of the character. When Ui appears, plastered with pale make-up and toothbrush moustache already in place, he’s already a Hitler-manqué, whereas you could argue that Ui only really achieves his true nefariousness in a scene that’s equal parts comic and chilling, when a faded Shakespearean actor instructs him in the ways of public speaking and rhetoric, using Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar as his text. Ui, seeing how he can manipulate those around him to his will, goose-steps around the stage, becoming increasingly manic and messianic in the process: a grim reminder of the ease with which populist leaders can find an appreciative audience. 

It’s a tough, fascinating and superbly conceived production

By the time that Ui is addressing his followers, and by extension, the audience in the climactic scene, ranting and raving as if he’s at one of the Nuremberg rallies, there has been a rare synthesis of actor, staging and conception of the play. Linnen, making his RSC debut, achieves a cinematic sweep at points, helped by Placebo’s quivering, jittery score (played on stage by live musicians, a welcome reminder of last year’s Hamlet Hail to the Thief), Georgia Lowe’s apposite set and costume design — both redolent of the Thirties, and of now — and Robbie Butler’s excellent lighting. All this results in a remarkable moment when a group of characters are tommy-gunned by a gangster wielding a vast cauliflower, and rather than blood, they shed red petals. 

It’s a tough, fascinating and superbly conceived production, with Gatiss’s cold, pitch-perfect performance the USP. And you leave somewhat shaken by the play’s final lines, when the actor playing Ui declares that, while Hitler is dead, “the bitch that bore him is in heat again.” Few, whatever their political leanings, would disagree.