Lessons from the dark side of history

Bertolt Brecht's satirical play on the rise of Adolf Hitler, set among the gangsters of a Chicago cauliflower syndicate, is a timely tale of the rise of a charismatic individual who arrives in a period of economic crisis, writes Peter Crawley

IT HAS BEEN a long day of rehearsals and, as the cast members of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uifile out of the Abbey, director Jimmy Fay finishes work with one request. He would like more cauliflowers.

"More cauliflowers?" asks stage manager Anne Layde, incredulously. "Jeeesus."

With daily news of a global recession, plunging stock values and punishing budgets, the cauliflower index may have escaped your notice. But Bertolt Brecht's 1941 satire on the rise of Adolf Hitler, set among the gangsters of a Chicago cauliflower syndicate, seizes that particular vegetable as an emblem of power and leverage.

This timely new production at the Abbey is acutely aware of the price of symbolism. When rehearsals began, four weeks previously, a tray of cauliflowers cost €9. Today it's more than €15. Even in the satire markets, trading is volatile.

Written in Finland, where Brecht spent some time in exile having fled Nazi persecution, the play combines stock incidents from Hollywood gangster movies with biographical allusions to celebrated crooks such as "Dutch" Schultz and Al Capone.

The parallels between each farcical scene and its historical corollary are literally spelled out in projections according to Brecht's anti-illusionist aesthetic. But although it dated quickly, unable to anticipate the Holocaust and slow to endear itself to a theatre (Brecht never saw it produced - it was first staged in 1958, two years after his death), the play announces its contemporary relevance from the opening line: "The times are bad."

As financial systems crumble and faith in political leadership buckles, the echoes between Brecht and the political moment are amplified by the verse dialogue: "This awful change from glut to destitution/ Has come more quickly than a maiden's blush."

It is a play, Fay admits, that the Abbey has been sitting on for a while, waiting for an appropriate moment.

In a rehearsal room lined with wooden vegetable crates, tommy guns and fresh cuttings from the print media (a newspaper chart reprints headlines chronicling the 1929 crash, while a recent Timemagazine cover runs the image of a depression-era soup line and proclaims, "The New Hard Times"), Fay considers a simple question: why this play, why now?

"I love the play anyway," he begins. "But if we were looking for something that was going to reflect everything [going on], the way you can with theatre, I don't think you could find a more perfect play. I also felt it would be a good play to do coming up to the American election. Then the [economic] crisis happened, which was either a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it . . . It feels very current. And I wanted to do something about America as well, not just Nazi Germany."

In rehearsals, the show is leaning heavily on an anarchic depiction of the US: an impressive cast, including Aidan Kelly, Karl Shiels, Malcolm Adams and Kate Brennan, play their supporting roles as wised-up hoods and breathy molls, while a slapstick trial scene, which alludes to the rigged Leipzig court that investigated the Reichstag fire, is punctuated with the piercing guitar of Jimi Hendix's version of The Star-Spangled Banner. A huge American flag, according to Conor Murphy's design, dwarfs the stage.

Although Fay came to the play interested in exploring Brecht's notion of epic theatre and its famous alienation effect (he has directed it once before, with his company Bedrock in 1995), this time he is more likely to refer to the lurching psychedelia of Frank Zappa as an influence. "He was such a satirist," Fay says of Zappa, referring to the song Plastic People.

"I found him a huge influence. I thought this production would be much more Zappa-esque."

Although Fay is unhesitant to stray from Brecht's leaden instructions ("Heiner Müller said that to use Brecht without criticising him is to do him a disservice"), the Zappa approach is not a world away from the frantic montage of Brecht's construction, and thickens the association between the political failings of Weimar Germany and US policy during the Bush years. "The Nazi thing is too easy," says Fay.

One wonders, with the end of George W Bush's exhausted and unpopular presidency, whether the American thing is also too easy. (As long ago as 2002, Al Pacino played Ui in an off-off-Broadway production that directly invoked Dubya as the tin-pot despot.)

"Yeah, probably," says Fay, who has a tendency to disarm criticism by readily agreeing with it. "But the current of the play is how the economic circumstances allow people to get into a depression. How it allows a chancer to suddenly go from having a little power to playing on people's fears and offering them protection. And that's constantly happening."

FAY DOESN'T SPARE Ireland from susceptibility to wheezy prejudices and political chicanery. "We live in a one-party State, for one."

And it is fascinating to learn that an Irish version of Ui, written by Roddy Doyle, had been mooted, approved by the Brecht Estate, but was subsequently abandoned over forbidding contract stipulations.

Fay baulks at the idea of "setting it in Ennis or something like that. Part of the appeal is the Americana: not just America itself, but this ideal of America."

At the centre of the production stands Ui himself, a mercurial figure who Brecht, not renowned for psychological realism, presents as almost bipolar, catatonic one minute and a whirl of violent energy the next. In a run through that day in the rehearsal room, while Eamon Morrissey's hapless politician Dogsborough sat impassively in a wheelchair and Malcolm Adams's thuggish Giri stomped on stray cabbages that exploded with a satisfying crunch, Tom Vaughan Lawlor's Ui was already shaping into a compelling stew of allusions.

Standing on a soapbox, addressing a butterfly microphone and matching a wise-guy accent with familiar chilling gestures, Vaughan Lawlor already seemed somewhere between Chicago and Nuremberg.

Leaving the Abbey for lunch, the actor pulled the bill of his cap down low to deflect attention from an appearance that has only one connotation. "It's the most famous moustache in the world, isn't it?" he says, tugging it. "It gets some terrible responses. People do double takes."

Playing Ui, which, essentially, means playing Hitler, is a tough act. And though Vaughan Lawlor says his research has been more enjoyable than for any other part - "Watching American gangster movies, reading about Hitler and listening to Wagner" - he tends to approach each role with an uncommon intensity. This one is proving to be an emotional experience.

"For all the talk of the distancing and trying to strip away emotion, your own life compensates both as an actor and as a person."

In other words, nature abhors a vacuum, and the more Vaughan Lawlor has tried to banish emotion, the more it floods in. It is playing havoc with his dreams, he admits, but the conundrum says much about the difficulty reconciling Brechtian theory with artistic practice. Take Brecht at his word, Fay and Vaughan Lawlor agree, and the drama becomes an academic exercise. "To understand someone's motivations," says Vaughan Lawlor, "you have to get close to them."

It is a challenge in a culture that has tended to confine Hitler to an inscrutable figure on the History Channel or the parody of The Producers; making him either a monster or a cartoon. The Abbey last produced The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uiin 1974, with Des Cave in the lead. With pleasing continuity, Cave returns to the new production as the actor hired by Ui to teach him how to walk, how to sit and how to declaim.

It is based in fact - Hitler took similar lessons - and allows Brecht the enjoyably pointed introduction: "It's an actor, boss. Unarmed."

Brecht shared this distrust of performance with his friend and fellow Marxist Walter Benjamin, who defined Fascism as the effort to render politics as aesthetic. For his part, Vaughan Lawlor recognises the play's stubborn refusal to obey the demands of its creator.

"There's a danger that, as an actor, you can get lost in the bravura of the part," he says. "You can get very easily carried away with the performative side."

But that is precisely the point. Fay, who points out Brechtian ripples in contemporary theatre - where even recent productions of Three Sistersand The Importance of Being Earnestdeliberately invoked their own artificiality - is still using the allure of spectacle. "That's why people go to the theatre," he says, "they like being excited by performances."

Ui might serve as the cautionary parable of a charismatic individual who arrives at a time of economic crisis, or political apathy, and marshals people to his cause. But Uihas always been seen as a powerhouse role, commanding all attention. As resistible as Ui's rise is meant to be, Brecht himself may have been hypnotised by his own creation.

The play concludes with a short epilogue, although Fay had not yet decided whether it will feature in his production. In the translation the Abbey is using, by Ralph Manheim, the play concludes with a stark caution: "But don't rejoice too soon at your escape - the womb he crawled from is still going strong." A rival translation may be more pithily familiar: "The bitch that bore him is in heat again."

Does the play stand as a prophecy, or a warning, for the resurgence of extremists in hard times? "It's both," says Fay. "It's a warning and it's also saying this could happen again. We live in cycles. People will always make rash decisions or wrong decisions."

Vaughan Lawlor, when asked the same question, plays down any alarmist readings, drawing attention to the contextual similarities.

"PEOPLE ARE RADICALISED in different ways," he says. "Look at the old-age pensioners losing their medical cards. People who aren't necessarily openly political are being moved to politics. In Britain the dissatisfaction with Gordon Brown is such that hardened Labour supporters are questioning whether they should look elsewhere."

At that moment an elderly English woman, sitting at the table next to us, leaned towards Vaughan Lawlor. "Unfortunately," she smiled, "there's nowhere else to look."

It was an innocuous moment, but an unusually sympathetic gesture to make to an eloquent young man in a Hitler moustache. However obvious the warning signs, however sobering the history lesson, in the right circumstances, Arturo Ui can still seem worryingly irresistible.

• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uiis previewing at the Abbey Theatre and opens on Tuesday