BRECHT’S NAZI PARABLE FINDS ITS MR REICH
The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui (Minerva Theatre, Chichester ) Verdict: Hooray for Henry! ★★★★✩
BERToLT BRECHT’S parable about the rise of Adolf Hitler in Thirties’ Germany is a mischievous hodge-podge of just about every gangster yarn you can think of. Partly comic, it’s set in Chicago with a small-time racketeer seizing control of the cauliflower trade. The play has echoes of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard iii, as well as The Godfather, Scarface and The Sopranos. it takes a particular kind of actor to pull all that off, but in Henry Goodman, Jonathan Church’s production has just the man. The bitter irony of Goodman’s casting is that he is a Jew playing history’s most notorious anti-semite. Weirdly, it’s like watching Shylock do Hitler in the guise of Al Capone. But that only makes Goodman’s performance all the more twisted — right down to his toothbrush tash. Goodman’s Ui is a master of comic solecism in Alistair Beaton’s nicely tweaked script, in which he mauls Shakespeare’s famous ‘friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech with a thick Brooklyn accent. not just a knock-about comedy in the vein of mel Brooks’s The Producers, this has a serious point to make: namely that a Berlusconian buffoon can become a mass murderer. As a result, the play is, in part, a history lesson, with the ominous burning down of the Reichstag in 1933 and the annexation of Austria in 1938 replaced by arson in a warehouse and the takeover of another gang’s patch. Yet for all the historical pointscoring, the show can be enjoyed as a classic gangster spoof. Against a film noir backdrop matching Chicago’s fire escapes with Berlin’s beer halls, michael Feast and Joe mcGann have a high time as Ui’s dapper henchmen. They are always handy with a wisecrack about their sinister trade in enforced protection: ‘no violence,’ they assure their victims, ‘just emphasis.’ Today, we call that spin.