Peter Viney's Blog

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
by Bertolt Brecht
Adapted by Bruce Norris

Directed by Simon Evans
Designed by Peter McIntosh

Donmar Warehouse, London
Tuesday 6th June 2017 19.30

Lenny Henry – Arturo Ui (Adolf Hitler)
Michael Pennington – Dogsborough (von Hindenburg) / Pastor
Lucy Ellinson – Emanuel Girl (Goering)
Lucy Eaton – Dockdaisy / Short gunman / Grocer
Philip Cumbus – Clark (Franz von Papen) / Prosecutor
Tom Edden – Announcer / the actor / Ragg /Sheet / Butler / Grocer
Giles Terera – Ernesto Roma (Ernst Rohm)
Justine Michelle- Dullfeet’s widow / O’Casey / Bowl
Simon Holland Roberts – Butcher / Judge / Dullfeet / Grocer  / Gunman
Louis Martin – Carothers / Bodyguard / Young Dogborough
Guy Rhys – Giuseppe Givola (Goebbels)
Gloria Obianyo – Flake / Hook / Inna / Grocer

REFERENCES:
Dullfeet is Dollfus, the assassinated Chancellor of Austria. Givola is Goebbels, Giri is Goering. (I know a song about them …)

For someone who doesn’t much like Brecht, I’m at my second Brecht play in a fortnight, following Life of Galileo. There are six cast members here who would have enticed us to book seats on their names alone. Obviously Sir Lenny Henry, but Lucy Ellinson was “Best actress” in my Best of 2016 list as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Add Tom Edden, Michael Pennington, Justine Mitchell and Philip Cumbus.

The play is adapted, rather than a simple translation.  Brecht wrote it in three weeks in Finland in 1941, and it is a direct allegory on the rise of Adolf Hitler, in the guise of a Chicago gangster. It was not performed until 1958, and it was always intended for the American stage. The parallels were meticulously plotted and I added some in brackets in the cast list. Chicago stood in for Germany, Cicero for Austria, The Warehouse is the Reichstag, and “The Cauliflower Trust” are the old Prussian Junkers, or landowners. There are references to both Richard III (the Lady Anne “set down your honourable load” scene) and Macbeth and Arturo takes lessons from an actor who also does the Hamlet soliloquy … come to think of it, I’ve seen all three Shakespeare plays set in Chicago 1930s too.

The updated version by Bruce Norris piles on the Donald Trump references; the newspaper journalists are “losers” and Ui wants to build a wall to keep out immigrants. Mrs Dullfeet is called “That nasty woman” and he didn’t like her husband either.  A sign falls with “Make Our Country Great Again.” The guy who takes the fall for arson is “an immigrant.” Some reviews thought the Trump stuff too obvious, but I find that criticism disingenuous. Brecht wanted the parallels with Hitler to be absolutely obvious. Brecht is nothing if not obvious on political references.  The Trump stuff fits and it enhances the play.

It’s been years since we’ve been to the Donmar. Like the Menier Chocolate Factory and the Almeida, it sells out so fast that non “Friends” have little chance of getting tickets, and befriending all three (plus the Globe, National, Old Vic and Young Vic) would be an expensive investment for those of us who live outside London. We couldn’t see enough plays to justify it.

The Donmar has been reconfigured with cabaret seating around the stage for this production. On which we were in the back row behind the cabaret seats on ordinary wooden upright chairs, which I found more comfortable than normal theatre seats. A chiropractor friend has often said a bog standard wooden dining chair is better than a comfy chair. True. I liked it. Being in the round, and we were near the stairs, we got a lot of back of the head while the actor was speaking, plus speeches made on the stairs by Lenny Henry were seen waist down only from our angle, so again harder to hear, as was the judge in the (excellent) trial scene, seated up in the balcony, so totally invisible for a quarter of downstairs. A definite minus, as actually it was in the square or rather than in the round. We had some effort hearing some lines.

Tom Edden as the actor coaches Lenny Henry’s Arturo Ui.

Yet in many ways the configuration and interactivity was the star of the show. Lenny Henry managed to shake hands with virtually everyone in the audience before the start, staying in character as Arturo Ui. Lucy Ellinson got to chat to a lot, though sadly not us.  The audience were used a great deal, which critics were iffy about, but I thought it a major positive. They were marched out, made to play a corpse and the wrongly accused in the trial scene over the Warehouse fire (i.e. Reichstag fire) was dragged from the audience. This gave great unpredictability. At the end we had to stand to vote for Arturo Ui, and very few did. Then the whole of one side of the square downstairs were forced out to form a booing crowd. That must fall differently every night, and the unpredictable bit (with Lucy Ellison working the audience) must last ten minutes. It’s brave, without a parachute theatre for the cast.

Lucy Ellinson as Giri

Because it’s Brecht, the rhythm of the 18 scenes is choppy. We need the connecting narrator  … a star performance by Tom Edden. There were menus on the cabaret tables, listing the scenes, and noting the 1930s Nazi parallels. They note that the cast play 35 characters, which is what all programmes proudly note with Brecht. Life of Galileo did just the same two weeks ago. Do we marvel at their versatility? Or do we say Brecht has no character development and simply lines up large numbers of stereotypes? (I’m for the latter). Look at the names of the roles in the cast list. I wasn’t aware of more than half of them while watching it.

I found the intrinsic narrative flow garbled and confusing enough, and I did a whole year politics course on the Rise of the One Party State, and read the books and wrote the essays on the rise of Fascism in Germany. It was many years ago, and it isn’t an interest I’ve maintained. My companion found the story even harder to follow because Brecht stuck too close to paralleling every move between Chicago and 1930s Germany, rather than letting the Chicago gangster theme develop its own impetus. That’s the trouble with didactic playwrights.

The adaptation is colloquial, thus removing Brechtian stiffness. It is liberally splattered with the F-word, the C-word and the Mother-F word. The adaptor is American, and one character in the play references the “profanities.” I agree that’s what an American would say, because I’ve noted three recent American uses in the last week for my work in progress on British English and American English.  But Jesus Christ! (That’s a profanity).  It’s fucking wrong! (That’s an obscenity, NOT a profanity). A profanity references God. An obscenity references sex. Jeez, get it fucking right! But as I said, it seems a common American error, and the play is set in Chicago. Or perhaps dictionaries should say that profanities covers both profanities and obscenities in American English.

The writing here has a marvellous rhyming dialogue between Arturo Ui and the widow of Dullfeet. You see, even the names are Pilgrim’s Progress hammer on the head allegory too.

As expected we got excellent performances from everyone. The interactivity and movement kept it lively. So much so that the still photos can’t represent it. They’re against darkness (to eliminate audience in the round) when the stage was much lighter and it was never static.  Lenny Henry is a lumbering, terrifying presence, the threat of violence hovering in the air around him, though Brecht’s Arturo is not overly bright. I suspect Hitler was considerably brighter and madder.

Giles Terera as Ernesto Roma

A special mention for Giles Terera as he wasn’t in my original list. He created a constantly ominous Ernesto Roma, with dyed blonde hair. Lucy Ellinson plays Giri, the Goering character as a man, and is physically as far from fat Hermann the German as you can get. But she had that constant mocking, manipulative role, and was the chief “audience worker” too, a role she takes easily. Tom Edden narrates and plays “the actor” excelling throughout, but especially in tutoring Arturo on walk and gestures. Justine Michelle is the lawyer in the trial scene, and Mrs Dullfeet. Both notable strong performances. The cast can’t be faulted, and the speed of movement and blocking shows first rate direction.

But, as with Life of Galileo, the play IS the thing, and in spite of this brilliant production, I think ANY Brecht play is incapable of drawing more than three stars from me.

***

THEATRE

Interval. £2.50 for a tiny bottle of “Life” purified (not mineral) water? Other theatres have a jug at the bar. Still, it’s offset by a remarkably  reasonable ticket price (£40) for such a stellar cast in such a tiny theatre. You could pay more than double a few hundred metres away in Covent Garden.

MUSIC CREDITS
As usual, hundreds of names of sponsors and minor roles in the programme, but I can’t find any credit to the people who wrote the music or the lyrics which peppered the play. Yet another theatre that unfairly fails on found music. I noted (with the aid of other reviews). They didn’t play recordings here. A mic was lowered and the cast sang.
Bonnie Tyler “Holding Out For A Hero”
Radiohead “Burn the Witch”
Rag’n’Bone Man “Human”.”
Creedence Clearwater Revival “Bad Moon Rising”
Mack The Knife
Danny Boy

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

4
Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
Kate Kellaway, The Observer ****
Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times, ****
Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard ****
3
Michael Billington, The Guardian – ***
Quentin Letts, Daily Mail ***
Paul Taylor, The Independent, ***
Nick Wells, Radio Times, ***
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out, ***
2
Anne Treneman, The Times **

LINKS:
BERTOLT BRECHT
Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht,

LENNY HENRY
Comedy of Errors NT 2012
Fences by August Wilson
Educating Rita, Chichester, 2015

LUCY ELLINSON
A Midsummer Night’s Dream RSC 2016, ‘A Play for the Nation’ at Stratford (Puck)
(Also see Best of 2016 here … Best Actress)

JUSTINE MITCHELL
For Services Rendered, by W. Somerset Maugham, Chichester Minerva Theatre, 2015
Love for Love  by Congreve, RSC 2015

TOM EDDEN
A Little Hotel On The Side – Feydeau, Bath
One Man, Two Guvnors– West End original run
Measure for Measure – Young Vic (Pompey)
Amadeus, National Theatre, 2017

MICHAEL PENNINGTON
Mark Anthony in Anthony & Cleopatra (Chichester)
John of Gaunt in Richard II (RSC)
Mr Hardcastle in She Stoops To Conquer (Bath)
The Doctor in The Syndicate (Bath, with Ian McKellen)
Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale, Branagh

PHILIP CUMBUS
Richard III, Trafalgar Studio 2014 (Earl of Richmond)
‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, Wanamaker Playhouse 2014,  (Vasquez)
The Importance of Being Earnest (with David Suchet), 2015 (Algernon)
First Light, Chichester 2016 (Max Henderson)
Comus, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016 (Henry Lawes)

GILES TERERA
King John, Globe, 2015