The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
★★★★★

APART from dating, there is always a danger with political satire that it reduces the realities it mocks to a laughing matter.

Sean Linnen’s programme note to his new production of Bertolt Brecht’s pantomimic treatment of the rise of Hitler, comments that whereas the play has often been called a warning from history, “it now feels like a howl from history going: Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Brecht rejected the comfortable complacencies of bourgeois theatre, preferring the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring. His vaudevillian cartoon drama, written in 1941 during his exile from Nazi Germany, was designed for what he hoped would be his new US audiences.

The Fuhrer and his henchmen become gangsters, with what he banked would be recent memories of Al Capone and familiar to film-goers, here running a protection racket controlling the Chicago vegetable markets.

In 15 sharply etched vignette scenes, key moments in the Nazi rise are signalled in projections above the action keeping an audience, who may not be familiar with the history, in touch.

So, the “convenient” Reichstag fire is captured by Ui’s thugs destroying the warehouse of a tradesman resistant to his offer of “protection,” and the Anschluss invasion of Austria is mirrored by Ui extending his power over Chicago to take over the neighbouring Cicero.

The Ui role is a gift to actors, and here, Mark Gatiss makes the most of it, appearing first as an insidious, down-and-out, intent upon ruthlessly worming his way into the financial corruption of a beset economy.

He is instructed in an hilarious scene in how to sit, walk and talk by a grand old Shakespearean ham actor — “join your arms over your private parts” — to become the Hitler we all recognise.

The Nazi hierarchy have often seemed like characters in a tragi-comic opera but it is not necessary here to recognise Marwan Rizwan as Goering, appropriately doubling as the audience-manipulating barker, and LJ Parkinson as the limping Goebbels, to appreciate their murderous “clowning.”

Once Brecht and Linnen have secured their audience, the mood changes with the Night of the Long Knives scene when Hitler in a deal with his business backers, here Ui with the Cauliflower Trust, agrees to wipe out his long-standing ally, Ernst Rohm/ Kardiff Kirwan’s bullyboy Roma. What seems like an interminable burst of machine-gun fire marks the onset of the Terror.

Today, Trump and his manic cavorting defies satire but Brecht’s play’s final warning that Hitler and his pack may have gone into history but the fascist bitch is on heat again, is as urgently relevant as ever.

Runs until April 30. Box office 01789 331-111, rsc.org.uk.