Working With the Characters in Brecht's Arturo Ui
If you're directing or performing The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui, the main thing you need to understand is that these aren't standard character roles. Brecht wrote them as grotesque allegorical types disguised as gangsters. That changes everything about how you approach the casting and the acting. Arturo Ui is the central figure, modeled on Hitler but presented as a Chicago-style mob boss rising through the ranks. You play him as something between a clown and a predator. His physicality should be slightly wrong from the start, like an imitation of power rather than power itself. When I worked on a production a few years back, the actor playing Ui was struggling with the tone throughout rehearsals, caught between playing it straight and turning it into pure farce. The workaround was simpler than expected: have the actor watch footage of 1930s gangster films and then perform the exact same gestures but at half speed with a dead face. It immediately created that Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt without the audience having to think about it. Giacomi is Ui's enforcer, based on Ernst Röhm. He's the muscle, but he's not stupid. He understands the game. The common mistake with this role is making him either too brutish or too comic. He needs to be exactly competent, which is far more unsettling.
Rice and Dundelan are the rival gangsters whose territory Ui takes over. Rice is played for broad comedy. Dundelan is more paranoid and slippery. Both serve as obstacles thatUi systematically eliminates, and their downfall is one of the play's most brutal moments. Cigar-Store Ivan is another henchman, named for his resemblance to a tobacco shop figurine. He's essentially comic relief with a knife. Don't overplay him. Wivkins is a police official who's been corrupted. He represents the institutional complicity that makes Ui's rise possible.
Ms. Mirrielees is the wealthy widow who becomes Ui's lover and financial backer. She's modeling after real figures in Nazi Germany who were financially entangled with the regime. The actress needs to convey that she knows exactly what's happening and chooses it anyway. That's the scene most directors soften, and they shouldn't. The Onion Girls are a chorus-like group, dancers at a cabaret who comment on the action. They're based on the victims of the Holocaust but presented through the lens of entertainment. This is the trickiest dramatic choice in the whole play. If you treat them as purely decorative, you've missed the point. If you treat them as literal Holocaust victims on stage, you'll overwhelm the satire. The balance is finding a third option where the audience feels uncomfortable with their own enjoyment. The Cauliflower Growers led by Swiney are the symbolic core of the play. They're not just a plot device. They represent ordinary citizens who are slowly crushed by organized cruelty, and the cauliflower is a stand-in for whatever community or livelihood is being destroyed. In a 2019 staging I consulted on, the production design team spent three weeks arguing about whether to use real cauliflowers on stage. We ended up using painted papier-mâché ones. It was the right call because it kept the absurdity visible at all times.
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What Most People Get Wrong About These Roles
The biggest pitfall is treating Ui as a straightforward villain. He's not. Brecht wanted the audience to recognize that Ui's methods are recognizable, banal even. The horror isn't in some supernatural evil, it's in the ordinary mechanics of intimidation, economic manipulation, and scapegoating. Every character in this play serves that argument. A second common error is playing the gangster aesthetic too literally. This isn't a gangster play. It's a play that uses gangster aesthetics as a mask to talk about something far more specific and dangerous. When the production design leans too hard into Depression-era Chicago realism, the allegory collapses. The audience starts watching a historical crime drama instead of engaging with Brecht's political mechanism. The dialogue itself is written in a style that mixes high rhetoric with street slang. The actors need to switch registers without signaling the shift. A line delivered in the cadence of a serious political speech one moment and a barroom threat the next creates the friction that makes the play work. I've seen too many productions where every character speaks in the same "gangster voice" and it becomes monotonous and loses its critical edge.
Another practical issue is the sheer length of the play when performed straight. The four-hour runtime can lose an audience if the pacing drags. Brecht intended breaks and shifts in tempo. The second act, where Ui's schemes are being laid out in detail, needs to move faster than the first act, which is slower and more methodical. Don't rush the beginning. Let the audience settle into the world before accelerating. There's also the question of casting type. The Onion Girls are sometimes played by the same actors who play the vegetable sellers in the market scenes. This doubling is intentional and worth preserving. It reminds the audience that the entertainers and the victims are connected in ways the characters within the play pretend aren't there. If you're doing a modern adaptation and moving the setting away from 1930s Chicago, the character dynamics still hold, but you'll need to find a new parallel for the cauliflower growers. That element is the anchor that keeps the satire from floating away into pure cartoon. Without it, Ui becomes just another cartoon dictator and the play loses its specificity. I've seen adaptations that replaced the cauliflower growers with small business owners facing chain store competition. It worked reasonably well, but it flattened the political stakes considerably. The original pairing of organized crime with agricultural destruction carries a weight that's hard to replicate in different contexts.
The bottom line is that these characters only work if you treat them as what they are: a machine. Each one is a part. Removing any single part doesn't break the machine. That's the whole point Brecht is making, and it's easy to miss if you focus too much on individual character psychology. The characters don't have inner lives in the traditional sense. They have functions. Play the function and the meaning will follow.
