Ridiculous, comic and scary - just like Adolf

First appeared: Evening Star, Ipswich, April 22, 2005

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht
Colchester Mercury Theatre until May 7

IN 1941, Hitler's Germany still looked capable of conquering all Europe. The great playwright Brecht, a refugee from the Nazis, arrived in America, which had not yet entered the war.

Many in the USA probably had little idea where Hitler had come from or what he was about. Arturo Ui was Brecht's way of educating them.

To do so, he moved the story of the Nazis' rise to Chicago, portraying Hitler/Ui and his henchmen as gangsters in the familiar Al Capone mode. There Ui and his lieutenant Roma are building up a crime empire based on a protection racket surrounding the cauliflower trade.

It is deliberately ridiculous - but it also becomes increasingly violent and troubling, as did the real Nazis.

There is nothing at all subtle about the play, or this production, which makes rather heavy-handed use of voiceover to point out the parallels between the careers of Ui and Hitler. But then subtle wasn't what was needed in 1941 - and maybe it isn't now.

Director Janice Dunn has made a very Brechtian improvement to Brecht's original by spicing it up with snippets of contemporary and very apt song, much in the manner of Dennis Potter's TV classic The Singing Detective.

The demise of Roma (alias Hitler's early comrade Ernst Rohm) to the jolly accompaniment of I Get A Kick Out Of You is inspired.

Equally effective is the appearance of Roma's ghost to Ui a few scenes later. It blatantly echoes the appearance of Banquo's ghost to Macbeth - just one of very many Shakespeare references that don't just litter the play, but positively landfill it.

As ever, the Mercury company are a tight unit, acting and singing with utter conviction.

Victor Gardener is a particularly strong presence as Roma. And at the heart of it all, Colm Gormley as Ui grows superbly from a twitching, neurotic wimp to a preening, posing, devastating tyrant - just like Hitler.

The point of the play's title is that Hitler's rise - like Ui's - could have been resisted, but wasn't. Like the Nazis, it's both comic and frightening.