"The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui". Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui as a warning. A grotesque parody of Hitler’s ascent to power, it was designed to show how easily tyranny can take hold when ordinary people look the other way. In 1941, that warning felt urgent. Now, more than eighty years on, the danger is not urgency but familiarity. Brecht’s once-radical theatrical devices – direct address, episodic structure, stylised performance – have been so thoroughly absorbed into the bloodstream of modern theatre that they no longer estrange us. They are simply part of the language. Echt Brecht is old hat. 

So what is a director to do with Arturo Ui now?

In the RSC’s exuberant new production at the Swan Theatre, director Seán Linnen doesn’t attempt to recreate Brecht’s chilly laboratory conditions. Instead, he blows the whole thing wide open. This is not a lesson in alienation. It’s a riot.

The stage is dominated by a mobile frame that functions as a kind of parody proscenium arch, constantly shifting perspective, with a live rock band perched on top, pounding out a soundtrack that gives the whole enterprise the energy of a political rally and a gig rolled into one. Beneath them, the cast tear into the material with anarchic glee. The gangsters giggle and bounce like a pack of hyenas from The Lion King, while their weaponry – sticks of celery and cobs of corn – turns the violence into something at once ridiculous and oddly unsettling. It’s Bugsy Malone by way of the greengrocer.

The narrator (Mawaan Rizwan, doubling as Göring-clone Giri) is crucial to the success of the evening. Instead of standing apart and reminding us that we are watching a play, he draws us in, like a stand-up comic working a room. The famous Brechtian distancing effect is quietly inverted: in a display not of Verfremdungs but Erfreudungseffekt, we are not pushed away, but pulled closer, made complicit in the rise of Ui. 

And what an Ui. Mark Gatiss delivers a performance of extraordinary range, balancing parody with genuine menace. The familiar mannerisms are there – the stiffness, the sudden flares of rage – but beneath them is a chilling sense of a man discovering, and relishing, his own power. He is funny, yes, but also terrifying. Appearance-wise, this is a Hitler straight out of 1940s newspaper cartoons, with painted moustache, insanely lank hair, fang-like yellow teeth, and cheek makeup so expressionist that it looks like it was designed by Fritz Lang. Part Führer, part Dr Mabuse, Gatiss is both ridiculous and unpredictably dangerous. Standing up in a bubble bath, wearing a skintight bathing suit, he demands total obedience or death. The laughter catches in the throat.

There are moments of pure theatrical invention throughout. The most striking comes when a group of gangsters are gunned down. Instead of collapsing instantly, their bodies convulse and dance in the invisible hail of bullets, a grotesque ballet that goes on just long enough to become uncomfortable. Then, suddenly, blood – in the form of red paper petals – bursts from their clothes. It’s shocking, beautiful, and completely in keeping with the production’s heightened, carnivalesque world.

If there is a weakness, it lies less with the staging than with the play itself. Arturo Ui is tied to its moment, and its allegory – once razor-sharp – can now feel slightly blunt. The mechanics of the rise are predictable, the moral framework a little too neat. But this production overcomes that by sheer force of theatrical imagination.

Gatiss notes in the programme that the play’s themes used to feel like a warning from history. Now they just feel like the news. Wisely, Linnen's production doesn’t labour the point. There are no clumsy modernisations. Instead, it saves its most direct statement for the end. In a newly devised epilogue, Gatiss wipes away Ui’s shoepolish moustache and addresses us directly: this is no time for celebration. “The bitch that bore him,” he reminds us, “is in heat again.”

It’s a line that lands with a chill, precisely because everything that has gone before has been so pantomimic. 

Brecht wanted us to stand back and think. This Arturo Ui makes us lean forward and feel. And in a world where the absurd and the real seem increasingly indistinguishable, it's good to see that theatre can still find a moral centre. Today's Uis are too busy dropping bombs on each other to come to Stratford. But this play, for all its faults, will outlive them all.