You wanna buy a cauliflower? I’m not entirely sure what this would have meant in 1930s Chicago but, in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, anyone trying to sell you ‘vegetables’ is probably a fascist. This brilliantly on-the-nose metaphor opens Brecht’s allegory of Hitler’s rise to power, and it is not long before we are told exactly what it is we are seeing.
The format is this: our story takes place somewhere in Chicago’s murky underworld, with up-and-coming gangster Arturo Ui (Hugh Linklater) working to bring the cauliflower trade under his thumb. And, after every scene, the Announcer (Ademide Obagun) spells out the allegory precisely. The Cauliflower Trust are the Junker industrialists; Chicago is Germany; Ui is Hitler. The cauliflower trade itself was a little murkier, hovering somewhere between Germany, democracy, and capitalism itself.
From this base, we begin to follow Ui along the path of extortion, murder, blackmail, and betrayal (not necessarily in that order), right to the top. The broad strokes are familiar ones, especially to those in the crowd with a History GCSE. By the end, part of the fun was trying to work out what I was seeing before the scene ended and the Announcer stepped in. If I am allowed one dorky German studies moment, it was nice to see Brecht’s famous Verfremdungseffekt (estranging the audience from the action to allow for critical thinking) in operation.
This is certainly a production that plays into the text’s self-awareness. The cast milling about before the show and during the interval, in costume but not quite in character, was a nice touch, reminding us (in classic Brechtian style) that we are watching people act in a play. Similarly, the extensive multi-roling allows for some nicely jarring moments. Harold Greenfields, as an example, plays a Cauliflower Trust member in the play’s first scene, before assuming his main role as Old Dogsborough (Hindenburg), where he grudgingly accepts the deal he just helped arrange.
Indeed, the only actor not to multi-role is Linklater as Arturo Ui. Ui is undoubtedly the centre of this production, and Linklater does fantastically to unify the bundle of moods and emotions the character brings. In his performance, the ridiculous scene in which Ui/Hitler is instructed in public speaking by a provincial actor (which deserved far more laughs than it got) and Ui’s genuinely chilling hunger sit perfectly alongside each other. His scenes with Ernesto Roma/Ernst Röhm (Rohan Joshi) were a particular highlight. In the sequence representing the Night of the Long Knives, Joshi does astonishingly well to make us sympathise with the plight of ‘the boys’/the SA, and it is his ghostly reappearance that gives us a taste of the pain Ui’s rise has inflicted on himself, as well as everyone else.
Ui’s other lieutenants, Giuseppe Givola/Joseph Göbbels (Tristan Morse), and Emmanuel Giri/Hermann Göring (Maya Luthi), meanwhile, wonderfully overplay the physicality of their characters. This both distinguishes them from their previous roles as Trust members and heightens the play’s physical comedy, which pokes at fascists’ immensely self-conscious self-fashioning. Roma heavily mistrusts Givola’s exaggerated limp; Giri’s ‘strongman’ stance, meanwhile, only heightens the contrast to Fish/Marinus Van der Lubbe’s (Ademide Obagun) bewildered resignation during the trial after Sheet’s warehouse burns down (representing the Reichstag fire). Davey Jerrit, as Clark/Franz von Papen, contributes his own bizarre brand of physicality with his repeated tongue-flicking, a mix of whimsy and inhumanity perhaps alluding to the ‘lizard’ conspiracy theories surrounding contemporary figures like Zuckerberg.
The effort put into these physical aspects of performance were, however, undermined somewhat by the blocking in the early parts of the play. The audience is arranged fully around the stage, and in the first few scenes my view of one character was often obstructed by another. On occasion, I could only see one or two faces in a scene of six characters. Nonetheless, the low walkway running diagonally across the stage was brilliantly multi-functional, used for elevation, loud movement, and divisions with equal parts subtlety and brash assertiveness. The seating arrangement constructed by director Milo Marsh and set designer Isabella Hamilton Dale is also absolutely justified by the play’s later sections, as it is pivotal to the engagement we feel when Ui/Hitler starts speaking to the people. During the trial, we are the jury, silenced by repeated monologues from Giri and Givola which purport to call for our involvement. We join the citizens of Chicago and Cicero/Austria in assessing Ui’s appeal for us to accept his protection.
It is frustrating, though, that the play does not go further down this path. Frustrating because, for most of the run, it feels like it is content to point at Hitler, Hindenburg, ‘the establishment’, say ‘bad’, and leave it at that. The Announcer attributing Hitler’s promotion to Chancellor exclusively to his personal leverage over Hindenburg left a particularly bad taste in the mouth. It feels odd to be issuing a historical correction in a play review, but Hitler’s appointment was massively influenced by the 1932 election results, which left the Nazis as the largest party in Germany. That broad popular support is never remarked upon.
The play’s moments of real power come when it bucks the trend of assigning Ui/Hitler’s rise to individuals, and begins to speak to us as not just an audience, but as citizens. That is clearest in the annexation of Cicero/Austria. The Chicagoan cauliflower traders, the ‘little men’, lamenting Ui’s rise and hoping Cicero will save them, before their Ciceronian counterparts give up the fight using the exact same words. Ui’s brilliantly performed speech against trade unionism, where the twisted but terribly logical ideology that underpins his actions is exposed as ideology, and not just power-lust, for the first time. That foreboding moment is followed by a sudden jump, the whole cast bursting into frenzied action and battering the floors to scream ‘VOTE! VOTE!’ at us all. It was in these moments that it felt like the question was genuinely being asked, the question of “how did Hitler do it?”.
The satire, the slapstick, the ‘vegetables’; they’re all good fun, and this is, if it hasn’t been clear, a very fun play to watch. And mocking Hitler in such direct fashion was no doubt provoking enough when Brecht wrote the play in 1941. However, it does not add substance to the cheap link to Trump created by both the play’s end and the newspapers covering the Pilch’s walls. It is not enough anymore to put on a play about fascism, point at Trump, and then declare that Arturo Ui is deeply relevant to our modern age. During the Ui’s scene with his actor-teacher, I was waiting for him to be instructed in Trump’s accordion-hands, or something like them; that is just one element of the real work I think is needed to make Arturo Ui, and stories like it, speak usefully to our present. Satirising Hitler as an individual is all well and good; but to make this play truly relevant, the bear of our complicity needed to be poked just a little more.