The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Playwright: Bertolt Brecht Adaptation: Bruce Norris Director: Simon Evans

Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, London WC2 (020-3282 3808) Until 17 June Running time: 2hrs 35mins (including interval)

Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 “gangster spectacle” is probably the German playwright’s “most easy-to-grasp work”, said Maxie Szalwinska in The Sunday Times. Using a “Richard Iii-like monster mobster in Prohibition-era Chicago”, it satirises the rise of Hitler and suggests that fascism is always stoppable as long as the people can be bothered to act. In this new adaptation, the acclaimed US playwright Bruce Norris has retooled the play to target – none too subtly – Donald Trump: Ui (Lenny Henry) rants about immigrants, boasts about the size of his crowds, and even vows to “make this country great again”. Sadly, “the parallels never develop beyond the most rudimentary Trump-is-hitler baiting”, and the knowing laughs that the various Trumpian outbursts elicit from the audience simply detract from what should be a “sense of impending horror”.

The Trump allusions are certainly a “stretch”, said Kate Kellaway in The Observer, but they don’t “wreck the play”. Henry is “magnificent”, especially in the “hilarious” scene in which he is taught by a drunk actor (Tom Edden) how to bear himself in a more leader-like way. He comes to look “every inch the gangster”, yet retains a “vulnerability and incomprehension” behind the bravado. The set is terrific, too: designer Peter Mckintosh has transformed the Donmar’s space into a 1930s speakeasy, with the audience sitting around the stage on small tables. Now and then, audience members get dragged from their seats to play a part in the show – to stand trial for starting a Reichstag-style fire, for example. The clear inference is that we’re all “part of whatever happens on the political stage”.

In my view, the audience interaction is “an unwelcome distraction”, said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. Theatregoers are smart enough not to require such stunts; nor do they need the kind of fingerwagging “how-this-is-relevant” speech in the closing moments of the play. Henry and the rest of the cast are great. But director Simon Evans has forgotten a golden rule: “Show, don’t tell.”