Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler – recast by Brecht into a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. Using a wide range of parody and pastiche – from Al Capone to Shakespeare's Richard III and Goethe's Faust – Brecht's compelling parable continues to have relevance wherever totalitarianism appears today.
Written during the Second World War in 1941, the play was one of the Berliner Ensemble's most outstanding box-office successes in 1959, and has continued to attract a succession of major actors, including Leonard Rossiter, Christopher Plummer, Antony Sher and Al Pacino.
This version, originally translated by George Tabori, has been revised by leading Scottish playwright Alistair Beaton.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a major dramatist of the twentieth century, and the founder of one of the most influential theatre companies, the Berliner Ensemble. He created of some of the landmark plays of the twentieth century: The Threepenny Opera, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
George Tabori (1914–2007) was a Hungarian writer. His works for the stage included Mein Kampf, an adaptation of Hitler's book, reimagined as comedy; and Cannibals, a major hit in the late '60s and the first play to be set entirely in Auschwitz. He also worked as Bertolt Brecht's assistant and translator.
Alistair Beaton is a well-known Scottish writer, whose plays and translations include Feelgood, Caledonia, King of Hearts and Follow My Leader, Max Frisch's The Arsonists, and Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. For television, he has written the award-winning A Very Social Secretary (2005) and the Channel 4 film The Trial of Tony Blair (2007).
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