The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (review)

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. By Bertolt Brecht. The Berliner Ensemble at Freud Theatre, University of California, Los Angeles. 9 July 1999.

During his lifetime, Bertolt Brecht had a well-documented love/hate relationship with the United States, most especially Los Angeles, where he lived from 1941 to 1947. Two years after departing America in 1949, Brecht helped found the Berliner Ensemble, one of the twentieth century's most important and influential theatre companies. Brecht, of course, never returned to the United States, and the Berliner Ensemble did not perform in the United States until early July of 1999, making its first (and apparently last) appearance with Brecht's epic, satiric, tragicomedy The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The production was originally conceived and directed in 1995 by the late Heiner Müller. Arturo Ui, the cartoonish parable of Hitler's rise to power set in Al Capone's Chicago, was an ideal choice for introducing the Berliner Ensemble's work to America.

After its six American performances, on the campuses of the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the Berliner Ensemble planned to disband. Actually, the company's plan was to reconstitute itself under Claus Peymann's leadership, changing its artistic philosophy while keeping the name of the Berliner Ensemble, that is, promising to extricate itself from Brecht's epic dramas and political tradition. In a very different Germany, indeed a very different world from that which Brecht knew, the Berliner Ensemble plans to produce other playwrights and incorporate other dramatic styles.

If this is so, and the Berliner Ensemble moves in different directions, then this production of Arturo Ui must be seen not merely as an individual performance but as a historically significant epitaph to the company's impact upon twentieth-century theatre. However, this farewell performance of Arturo Ui was no polemic Brechtian theatre fossil. The evening was indeed memorable, not because it was the final opportunity to see the work of a great company, but because the staging was so visually arresting and the ensemble work so vivid and cohesive. Mostly, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was unforgettable, especially for Martin Wuttke's tour-de-force enactment of the title character.

The curtain rose, appropriately enough, to the music of Hitler's beloved Richard Wagner. A brief segment from the overture to Tristan and Isolde segued into the crashing music of Franz Schubert's setting for the Erl-King. At this point, Arturo Ui, the man who would be king, was first seen as a bare-chested, red-tongued, hyperventilating wolf, walking on all fours and circling one of the production's symbolic centerpieces--an entombed, decaying engine. The process which turned this panting animal into an occasionally laughable subhuman figure, one capable of inducing enormous villainy and terror, were among Wuttke's great technical achievements. His character transformations both dazzled and repelled.

The most Brechtian element of Wuttke's tragic performance was its being informed by film clowns. The production included performative references to Chaplin's Great Dictator (so admired by Brecht) and Jerry Lewis's stuttering, squeaky-voiced little big man. Interwoven were physical skills rivaling those of John Cleese, particularly evident in a goose-step parody which culminated in Arturo Ui shaping himself into a horrifying human swastika. While there may never be anything funny about a swastika, its use by Wuttke struck the entirely appropriate chords of shock, horror, terror, and very dark, very stark comic blackness.

Throughout the evening, comic and tragic Shakespearean references abounded. Brecht had his mind on Richard III in creating the relationship between Roma (Thomas Anzenhofer) and Ui. Like Richard III's Buckingham, Roma is the brains, leading the inept Ui by the nose and, with a sexual subtext between these two bullies, by the trousers. Brecht also adapted the Richard III/Lady Anne wooing scene into a sexual parody between Ui and Mrs. Dullfeet. Traute Höß, the production's Mrs. Dullfeet, resembles Margaret Dumont and played...