Sometimes a playwright seizes history by the throat, shakes it like a terrier with a stolen bone, and shouts: ‘Look at this — don’t you dare look away again.’
Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is one such moment: a gangster parable masquerading as a clown show, a political sermon delivered by a man with a custard pie in one hand and a guillotine in the other.
Brecht takes the rise of Hitler and transforms it into a Chicago protection racket so tawdry and pathetic that one wonders how humanity ever surrendered to such mediocrity. And that’s precisely the point: tyranny rarely arrives as a titan; it crawls in as a joke. It’s born not in thunder but in the grubby corners where cowardice, vanity, and self-interest huddle together for warmth.
Arturo Ui is a buffoon. A petty thug.
A narcissistic little man who struts about with all the swagger of a rooster who’s mistaken himself for Rome’s eagle.
But the world around him is even worse: businessmen eager to be blackmailed, politicians dazzled by violence, an electorate asleep at the wheel, happy to hand over its spine for the promise of someone else doing the thinking.
If Beckett shows us the collapse of meaning, Brecht shows us the collapse of courage.
It’s not evil that triumphs — it is apathy. Not strength — but theatricality. Not ideology — but the willingness of society to be entertained rather than enlightened.
Ui becomes dictator not because he’s brilliant, but because the people around him would rather bow than bother. He’s the sort of villain who practises his speeches in front of a mirror like a talent show contestant, a parody of Caesar who has learnt all the wrong lessons from Shakespeare. Brecht makes him deliver his lines in cod-Elizabethan pomp, as if to remind us that tyranny is always, at its core, a performance — and a rather shoddy one at that.
What makes the play so uncomfortable today is its prophetic accuracy.
Ui’s tactics — intimidation disguised as justice, propaganda disguised as patriotism, populism disguised as salvation — remain depressingly familiar.
We’ve met this man before. We’ll meet him again. He changes his hat every century, but the head beneath is always the same.
And Brecht’s final warning, delivered directly to the audience in a tone that cuts through time like a knife, is unmistakable:
‘The womb is fertile still…’
Not the womb of ideology, but the womb of human weakness. The womb of fear. The womb of puffed-up political celebrities who arrive with nothing to say but say it loudly. The womb of crowds who want miracles without responsibility. The womb of democracies that prefer comfort to vigilance.
In that sense, Arturo Ui is the most Christian of Brecht’s parables, though he intended no such thing: it’s a morality play in which every character is tempted by the simplest of sins — cowardice. And cowardice, as Scripture hints more than once, is the seedbed of all greater wickedness.
This isn’t a history lesson. It’s a mirror. And Brecht holds it right up to our noses.
Wording 