The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Mark Gatiss at the RSC – review

It’s easy to see why the RSC has revived Bertolt Brecht’s cautionary fable about the unchecked rise to power of a populist right-wing demagogue at this volatile moment in our history. It’s a vivid warning, drawn in primary colours and flashing lights, to anyone who’s paying even the slightest attention to what’s happening in countries around the world.

And with the extraordinary casting of an unrecognisable Mark Gatiss as the eponymous lowlife gangster who wheedles, cajoles, bribes and bullies his way to absolute authority in the crime-ridden setting of 1930s Chicago, the parallels to both the past and the present are spelled out – literally, on a projected caption board – in large capital letters. And not the kind you’d read in a presidential social media post.

The allegorical nature of Brecht’s play is not subtle, but then when he wrote it in 1941, the world was in the middle of its last major collapse, so maybe he can be forgiven a little heavy-handedness. But the weight of metaphor sometimes hangs a little too heavy in Seán Linnen’s debut directorial outing for the company, dressed in those primary colours by designer Georgia Lowe and featuring quasi-Nazi uniforms and emblems as Ui’s authoritarian hold over his community grows increasingly violent and unstoppable in the face of a populace too compliant, too cowed or simply too blind to see the end result before it’s too late.

Linnen’s staging deliberately makes the audience complicit: at the start, when comedian Mawaan Rizwan does a mini stand-up routine to introduce the characters, we are invited to applaud, TV studio-style. The willingness to comply comes back to bite us later when the applause is for a very different compere, its purpose much darker.

Rizwan is full of raw electric energy and is consistently watchable. So too is musicals veteran Janie Dee in a range of roles, and a strong supporting cast that includes RSC stalwart Christopher Godwin. But the night is unquestionably Gatiss’, whether he’s learning oratory from a provincial actor or practising a performer’s gait that turns all to easily into a goose-step. With his miniature moustache and slicked-down fringe, his likeness to a certain dictator is unsettling without being over-the-top, and his gradual emergence as a uniformed autocrat includes pertinent nods to other suspect national leaders along the way.

With music by Placebo, performed by an accomplished band on top of a giant platform that trucks on and off the stage, the whole thing looks by turns cartoonish, cultish and ultimately terrifying, with an epilogue that’s blunt enough to chill the soul.

It may not have the punch or cleverness of Arthur Miller’s later allegorical play The Crucible, but Arturo Ui is a character to be feared, fought and rejected. Brecht argues his rise is resistible: only time will tell if his optimism is right in the second quarter of the 21st century.