What would Brecht have thought of the onstage smoking of herbal cigarettes? Would that rancid pong count as an alienation effect? Unlikely, since he was a man who was fond of his stogie; he once objected to King Lear because you get so caught up in it that you let you cigar go out. (Ah, another age…)  Luckily, the same kind of thing happens in the course of Jonathan Church’s Chichester revival of Brecht’s blackly farcical gangster parable of the rise of Hitler: the performance overcomes the whiff of herbals.
    
Central, obviously, is Henry Goodman’s portrayal of Ui. He blends Hitler, Chaplin, Michael Jackson (really) and most of all Joe Pesci to create an antsy little guy who, even after detailed coaching in elocution and gesture, even after taking over the greengrocery trade of Chicago and then annexing to it that of neighbouring Cicero, remains edgy and insecure. Which is, after all, Brecht’s point: Hitler was not uniquely villainous and could have been stopped, as the title also emphasises.
    
Church has assembled a sterling cast around Goodman, too. His lieutenants include Joe McGann as an analogue of Hermann Göring and Michael Feast as Ernesto Roma, alias Ernst Röhm. (And when Roma is offed in a cross between the Night of the Long Knives and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, boy, but that tommy-gun is loud in the Minerva studio!)  His corporate paymasters include Rolf Saxon, and William Gaunt now naturally possesses much of the preternatural dignity required for the Hindenburg figure. Simon Higlett’s design blends pinstripes and gats with some impressive large-scale effects such as the chilling final coup, and also some nice discreet touches: Goodman, as an actor given to exploring his Jewishness, no doubt relishes that the “Ui” device adopted in place of the swastika by this most un-Jewish character slightly resembles a stylised menorah.
    
Nor is the play limited to its obvious historical aspect. As the last line of George Tabori’s translation warns, “The bitch that bore him is in heat again”, and a glance at the current international vista of economic depression, intolerance and political/big-business graft should be enough to confirm it. Church’s programming may have épaté les bourgeois of his Chichester audience, but there is more to it, both as timely admonition and above all as fine theatre.

Written for the Financial Times.