A strong performance from the villain in 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui' is the only reason Brecht's play survives on the stage, and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor doesn't disappoint, writes Fintan O'Toole
IN MANY WAYS, the history of productions of the plays of Bertolt Brecht is a history of the struggle between the author's intentions on the one hand and his theatrical genius on the other. Brecht didn't want us to sympathise with the protagonists of his two greatest plays, Mother Courage and The Life of Galileo, but those figures are so compellingly written that we do. He wanted us to understand The Caucasian Chalk Circle as a vindication of Stalin's appalling treatment of the people of the Caucasus. We admire the play, if we do so at all, not because of those bad politics, but in spite of them.
In the case of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the disjunction between intention and effect is even greater. Brecht wrote the play in exile and intended it for production in the US - thus the use of Hollywood gangster movies as the paradigm for his parable on the rise of Adolf Hitler. It was supposed to be an urgent intervention in the day's politics, urging Americans, who were still neutral, to resist the Nazis. Instead it was produced neither in the US nor in 1941, but in Germany in 1958. It became something it was not intended to be - a retrospective commentary rather than an immediate, fast satire (Brecht wrote it in three weeks and wanted it to be played at top speed).
But something else happened to the play as well. Intellectually, it is not really about Hitler, but about the folly of those in the mainstream right and the business elite who thought they could use him for their own ends and then get rid of him when he'd done the dirty work. It is not actually a very good description of Hitler's rise in general - there is nothing in it about anti-Semitism, or the aftermath of the first World War, or the use of street politics. Its focus is narrow and specific. The big figures are supposed to be the Prussian junkers (satirised as the Cauliflower Trust), the conservative politician Von Papen (Clark in the play), the right-wing president and war hero Hindenburg (Dogsborough), and the authoritarian Austrian leader Dolfuss. The aim of the satire is their tragic folly.
The spanner in the works, though, is acting. The Hitler part, the gangster Arturo Ui, is simply better written, more dynamic and more theatrical in its conception than all the others. In a sense, Brecht, for all his loathing of Hitler and all his determination to show him as nothing more than the puppet of the rich, is as much in thrall to his cult of personality as everyone else. He is, first and foremost, a great dramatist and his instinct is to create a great role. And he knows from Shakespeare that the best role tends to be that of the villain.
It is not for nothing that Arturo Ui has deliberate echoes of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth and, above all, of that most fascinating tyrant, Richard III. Not for nothing either that, among the great actors who have been drawn to the role of Ui, at least two (Al Pacino and Antony Sher) have played both Ui and Richard. The theatricality of evil draws in big performers and those big performances in turn alter the balance of Brecht's play.
In all honesty, this is probably the only reason that Arturo Ui survives on the stage. It is not a patch on Brecht's great plays. Even the idea of using gangsterism as a political metaphor (an idea borrowed, of course, from John Gay's 18th-century satire The Beggar's Opera) was much more richly executed in The Threepenny Opera. And an analysis of Nazism that leaves out anti-Semitism is historically worthless. In the end, it is only the portrayal of Hitler, satiric but compelling, that makes the play worthwhile.
The fascinating thing about Jimmy Fay's production at the Abbey is that you can see this process at work before your eyes. The production has all the right things for a Brecht play - good ensemble playing, a superb use of the stage as a constantly shifting panorama in Conor Murphy's designs, and the right touch of contemporary echoes in the use of a giant American flag and of Jimi Hendrix's deranged version of The Star-Spangled Banner. It even has a performance from Aidan Kelly as Roma (Ernst Röhm) that, in other circumstances, would be outstanding.
But the production is invaded and annexed by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor's astonishing Ui. Vaughan-Lawlor takes his cue from Charlie Chaplin's cartoonish version of Hitler in The Great Dictator, spiced with a dash of Groucho Marx, and if he did no more than sustain the physical trickery and precise clowning that this involves, his would be a fine performance. But he does much more. He manages to plot a convincing course from his first appearance as a ludicrous grotesque, a deluded bum of no account, to his final manifestation as a triumphant tyrant. Lawlor does this in a way that is easy to say and incredibly hard to achieve - he changes his shape. He starts out bent double, as if afraid to take up too much space. He ends up straight and expansive. But the real trick is that he manages this transformation over time, gesture by gesture. The scene in which this shift is distilled, when he takes lessons from the old actor played superbly by Des Cave, is the most electrifying we've seen on the Abbey stage for a long time.
If the play were better, if it achieved what Brecht wanted it to achieve, Lawlor's domination might be wrong. But such a performance is now the main point of Arturo Ui. In Vaughan-Lawlor's case, it may not be Brecht, but it is magnificent.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uiis at the Abbey until Dec 6