Irresistible satire of evil gangster's rise to power
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The Abbey Theatre
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Arturo Ui in Bertolt Brecht's 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui' at the Abbey in Dublin
Did Bertolt Brecht really believe his gangster's rise to power, paralleling Hitler's in Germany, was 'resistible'? It seems anything but.
The good guys get a few uninspiring lines while the ones who aren't outright murderers are married to greed.
But though it doesn't offer a formula for resistance to evil, this play remains one of the most powerful narratives of its eruption and accommodation. On every level, this is the best Abbey production I've seen for a couple of years.
Tom Vaughan Lawlor's Arturo is simply stunning. Imagine Jack Nicholson in full manic flow playing Charlie Chaplin as 'The Great Dictator' with Basil Fawlty's mocking body language.
Though there's plenty to laugh at, particularly when Arturo is being given lessons in voice and deportment from a tipsy ham actor (Des Cave), the tide of terror beneath his rise to the heights of power exerts an unflagging pressure.
As someone said during interval drinks, it's a scary show. And not just because Vaughan Lawlor makes Gollum look cuddly. His henchmen and partners: Karl Shiels, Aidan Kelly, and Malcom Adams radiate physical danger like bouncers soaked in Lynx body spray.
Some ensemble scenes are gloriously phantasmagoric. Malcom Adams' character is on trial for burning down a warehouse, but the whole courtroom apart from a single lawyer is in Arturo's pocket. Not least the judge, a giant bewigged puppet with monstrous hands and Ui in the driving seat. At no point is any part of the Abbey's ample stage left underused, it's shrunk and expanded with liquid facility, and even at full stretch, when Arturo is having his 'Night of the Long Knives', the empty spaces seems suffused with clouds of blood.
Director Jimmy Fay adds some Brechtian touches of his own. Given Obama's electoral win there seems something refreshingly sacrilegious in ending the first act with Jimmy Hendrix's 'Star Spangled Banner' as an innocent girl is riddled with bullets.
- John McKeown
