Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui - Theatre Works

Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (played here by George Banders), the fictional Chicagoan crime lord, is of course Bertolt Brecht’s parodic and blatantly allegorical version of Adolf Hitler, rendered comprehensible for an American audience in 1941. Since the play took 22 years to make it to Broadway, it has only ever been performed in front of already well-versed audiences, and never as an introductory education on the history of Nazi Germany. Before they’ve even sat down, this 2016 Australian audience will already hate the infamous dictator just as much as the play’s 1963 American audience would have, but their prior knowledge of Brecht and Epic theatre will be less certain. In this production, Rouse bombards the audience with countless lines of text for the same purpose that Brecht once did: to give the audience all the facts they need to follow the allegory and understand his message, without being “distracted” by the fictional story he is telling. In contemporary theatre making this is known as heavy-handedness, but in the 1920s the idea of using theatre to shamelessly recruit people as political activists was a novel and exciting one. However, even today Rouse gets away with it by embracing this style of alienating the audience from the pathos of the story, and by having his own anti-right wing political agenda to parade around. The text on the screen and a handful of throwaway lines make it abundantly clear that Donald Trump is the politician he is truly taking aim at, with the original Hitler allegory itself becoming an allegory for a much more contemporary issue. There is also another, much more subtle comparison made between the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, which interestingly is pulled off without the assistance of the fact slides. However, there are times when the three story levels, one literal and two allegorical, feel like they are about to crumble in and collapse on one another. It was also a questionable choice in the otherwise sound set design by Martelle Hunt to put the screen so high above the actors. Much of the opening dance sequence and character introductions will likely go unseen by audience members who are reading the opening text, and likewise, many important pieces of text shown throughout the production will go unread since there is rarely anything to direct people’s attention all the way up there. This is why Brecht would project his text at the back of the stage, so that it was always in view. Also, despite all the text, the self-aware jokes and the intentional breaking of character, there is one Brechtian technique that Rouse uses only very sparingly: bright lighting. There is a brief moment where the entire theatre is strongly illuminated and an awkward false curtain call plays out, but, for the most part, Rob Sowinski and Bryn Cullen’s lighting design is surprisingly traditional, putting the audience at a very comfortable distance and ultimately making the viewing experience too passive for this sort of material. Part of the intention of a show like this is to disorientate the audience, to pull them out of the story and keep the focus on the message, but until the very end of the play, the message within the message tends to make the space outside the story just as murky as the story itself. Fortunately though, each time both the narrative and its social significance become unstable, there are always the characters to fall back on. One of Brecht’s greatest inconsistencies was that, despite his frequent postulations on the importance of emotional distance, he had an irrepressible knack for writing vivid and endearing characters. Here we have the ruthless Ernesto Roma (Peter Paltos), Ui’s tough mentor in crime who turned a spineless common thief into a deadly rabble-rouser with the nerve to eventually kill him. In a “parable play” that draws heavily on Shakespeare, and even goes as far as flat-out copying a few scenes from Richard III, Roma, and his real life counterpart Ernst Röhm, are both the Banquo and the Lady Macbeth in Ui and Hitlers’ origin stories. Paltos not only masters his menacing presence, but, with the right makeup on, he also happens to look a lot like Laurence Olivier. Of course, the other standout characterisation here is Ui himself. Banders certainly has the right stuff and isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with the audience while in character. He consciously breaks the fourth wall in a glorious moment of theatrical self-reference and, in one scene, he impressively manages a dexterous run through the audience. Thanks to the talents of Banders, Paltos, Brecht and Rouse, the great anti-hero and his seedy keeper have a life beyond the confines of the allegories, something they probably weren’t supposed to have in theory, but in practice is really what allows this piece to work as a two-hour play. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

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