The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a savage and witty parable of the rise of Adolf Hitler – recast by Bertolt Brecht into a small-time Chicago gangster’s takeover of the city’s greengrocery trade. The caricatured world of businessmen and mobsters has direct counterparts in real-life Nazi Germany. Brecht wrote the play in exile in 1941 just before his arrival in the USA, investing it with an outspoken didactic message: to provide the American audiences with a clear analysis of the reasons for and consequences of the events in the 1930s Germany and highlight the fact that Hitler’s rise to power was simple, abrupt and utterly resistible. The ascendance of this monstrous person, who has rendered the whole world speechless, was enabled by capitalism, psychological mechanisms of a nation faced with its imperilled existence and small corruptive methods of power accumulation that refuse acknowledgement of the ultimate responsibility.

The play presents a wide range of parody and pastiche – from Richard III to Al Capone, from Mark Antony to Faust – without diminishing the horror of the real life Nazi prototypes. What in Brecht’s day was an allegory, a simplified and entirely grotesque image of an adventure undertaken by the mob and the government in their rise to prominence, has today gained a very contemporary edge.