Milestone in theatre history

'Arturo Ui', Bertolt Brecht's political satire has been included as one of the items of the Indo-German festival. The play is to be staged in New Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta, says VASANTI SANKARANARAYANAN.

WRITTEN in 1941 during his years in exile in the United States, Bertolt Brecht's "Arturo Ui" is a political satire about the making of a fascist. It retells the story of Hitler and the Nazi era. But, if one closely examines it, it is not just about Hitler. Set in Chicago in the 1920s, Brecht modelled the plot and characters on Al Capone's mafia rule in order to demonstrate not only the dangers of National Socialism and Fascism, but also the relationship between fascism, crime and capitalism. "Arturo Ui" is also termed as the comic confluence of a gangster story and German history, and the figure of Ui reveals a facet of political life, topical in the contemporary world - namely the proximity of showmanship to demagogery and modern mass politics.

The play has been produced by the Berliner Ensemble, the group initiated by the playwright himself. The director was the late Heiner Muller who has had the distinction of knowing Brecht and imbibing his "Lehrstuck" (teaching plays). It has been included as one of the items of the Indo-German Festival, but, unfortunately, it is not coming to Chennai. Chennai does not have a stage where "Arturo Ui' can be performed using modern technological inputs. The production, therefore, will go only to New Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta.

For any lover of Brecht's plays, a visit to the Berliner Ensemble is like a pilgrimage; situated on the banks of the Speer river, the Ensemble theatre (or Theater Am Schiffbauerdamm) has an elegance of its own. It is preserved as it was in the time of Bertolt Brecht. The height and depth of the stage takes one's breath away. Added to all this is the knowledge that this play is the last production of Heiner Muller whose fame as a playwright, theoretician and director is undisputed all over Germany. Last, but not the least, what aroused my curiosity was the presence of Martin Wuttke, a leading German actor who was chosen as "Actor of the Year" by Theater Heute, one of Germany's top theatre magazines.

It is not my intention to go into the details of the play or my impressions of it in this article, for I realise it would be an exercise in futility for readers denied the chance of seeing the play. Sufficient to say that Martin Wuttke, as Arturo Ui, is unforgettable. I had a chance to talk to Martin Wuttke and Stephan Suschke, assistant director, that gave me valuable insights into this production.

First, a synopsis of the plot. The unemployed Ui comes to Chicago with seven thugs to bring peace to the vegetable market. While posing as a law-abiding citizen and a family man, he is a hoodlum intent on establishing a monopoly racket. Selling production to legitimate businessmen against burglaries and robberies, his gang uses violence and murder when they refuse to cooperate. Political bribery, corrupt police, gang violence and manipulation of a timid mass press are all the techniques that Ui uses to gain supreme power. In creating a character such as Ui's, Brecht tries to illustrate the relationship between fascism, crime and capitalism.

I asked Martin Wuttke why he chose acting as a profession. With a twinkle in his eye, he answered, "I was thrown out of school, because I could not keep up with the strictures of the educational system. At that point I wanted to be a sculptor. However, the girl I was dating was keen on acting as a profession and was studying in an art school in Dusseldorf. She went for an audition and I went with her. I was selected and thus began my career in acting. You could call it pure accident." Later, he was trained at the Actors School in Bohum under Peter Zadek, a leading director of Germany, and in Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, he began to act small parts. In the second year, he played the role of Hamlet.

The turning point in his life was the decade he worked with noted director Einar Schleef. Each year there was one production. One of the important parts he played was that of Faust. Schleef's association with the Berliner Ensemble, enabled Wuttkee also to came into contact with it.

Brecht was no longer important in Germany, he said. "Nobody talks of him in Germany any more." I told him that in India, Brecht is a major influence on playwrights and theatre activists and his plays have been translated into several Indian languages.

Wuttke is amused. "I had a similar experience when our group visited South America. An old actor came up to me and told me of his visit to the Berliner Ensemble theatre in Berlin. He called it a pilgrimage. Our theatre group was treated with such respect and warmth.

He finds Brecht's theories on acting "boring", but his plays fascinating.

He has never worked with Brecht. However, he has been directed in his impersonation of Arturo Ui, by a celebrity none other than the late Heiner Muller. Explaining why Brechtian theories are a little outdated in the modern context of Germany he says, "Brecht himself would today look at his theories formulated in the 1940s and 1950s differently. They came out of the social and political context he was living in. If these situations change, the manner of expressions in theatre have also got to change. Brecht's 'alienation' theory has been canned. What is normal in today's context alone can form the basis of contemporary theatre theory. It is important to remember that Brecht developed his theories in opposition to the Naturalist theory, which he saw as the elite or bourgeois form. He wanted to open up theatre for people and, therefore, initiated his theory of alienation. Brecht never said anything theoretical during rehearsals. The actors he worked with did not always come from his kind of training. Brechtian theory was not a law, but a way of opening up possibilities in acting. It would be best to remember that theory was only a manual or instruction for acting."

Talking of Arturo Ui specifically, Wuttke said, "The play was written while Brecht was in Finland waiting for his visa to the United States. Even in 1941-42, he had a naive way of looking at Hitler. This is questionable. He did not know about the concentration camps and other such realities connected with Hitler. He should have related to it better. It is very clear that the play was written for an American audience. That is why the mechanical image of Hitler emerges. Brecht wanted to show that Hitler could not have become what he was without the active support and participation of the industrialists and capitalists. Viewing the play with a German perspective changes the play considerably. First, we have to demystify Hitler as a person and show him as a figure we could laugh at. We have to work against making him a figure larger than life. For somebody growing up in Germany, there are so many different ways of encountering Hitler as a phenomenon. The totality of this phenomenon cannot be fitted into the role of Arturo Ui. In the production, I have tried to keep the historical figure in mind.

"When we did the play we thought we would broadly follow the script and plot of the play as it is. But a mere reproduction would have resulted in a didactic interpretation of the play. We consciously tried to make some scenes difficult. We also introduced emotional heat into the play through music and acting. In fact this is something Brecht would have liked. Brecht had a mechanical idea of what was going on in Germany. He thought that Hitler was just a toy in the hands of big industrialists. That is why it does not become clear who Hitler was as a historical figure. Through the doubling of the actor and the historical figure, Arturo Ui holds a fascination for the audience then and now. It is also looking at Hitler as a Pop figure with the gap of 50 years. He becomes an artificial, comic figure. The task of the actor donning the role of Arturo Ui is very fascinating, because he has to present a figure that constructs himself. The idea of the "self made man" is what is projected. The central idea is that of puppet that was a puppet in the beginning but in the end became a puppet master.

"Another topic debated is the relationship between politics, criminality and entertainment. This is relevant even in the contemporary world scenario. This is the aspect which gives it universal appeal. So I have tried to keep that in mind when I do the role of Arturo Ui. Political demagoguery is related to personal charisma. This is the aspect of the play which is easier to take up. Forget Hitler. Even if you do not realise fully that Hitler is the figure Arturo Ui represents, by himself, Arturo Ui is an interesting character to impersonate. There is an Arturo Ui in every part of the world - a mixture of politics, criminality and entertainment. "Demagoguery comes out of entertainment. Entertainment creates politicians; politicians turn criminals. These are all interconnected. So, this is the aspect which I have tried to highlight in Arturo Ui. There is one piece of dialogue that gives a clue about Arturo Ui (Hitler)'s character which is "I do not want political power, but I want to be recognised". It is this yearning to be recognised that makes human beings "power crazy". In some, it would remain as striving for excellence, but, in others it would turn out to be schizophrenic frenzy. If recognition does not come through straight paths, they resort to illegal and criminal means. Power becomes the operative word. In order to understand Arturo Ui (the phenomenon that was Hitler) one has to go into the psychological analysis that would be relevant in this case.

The discussion then turned to the director, the late Heiner Muller. Muller, according to Wuttke and Suschke, was not just a director or a playwright . When the Wall came down, he was a social commentator of significance. Born in 1929, his first noteworthy experience was watching his father being transported to a concentration camp in 1934. There was a sense of betrayal when his father was deported. His father wanted to bid farewell, but, he hid under the bedclothes. From then on, this realisation that he is an outsider goes on all the way to the 1970s. Being grounded in German history and literature, he stayed on after 1945 in East Germany. He was interested in it as a project. He published his first play in 1956 and with difficulty. He was prohibited from staging his plays for political reasons. He focussed on tragic stories using a great deal of antique mythology. All his plays reflected the pain he felt about Germany and its plight. The first play he directed freely was in 1982. He understood theatre in a different way.

The first play in which Wuttuke and Muller worked together was "Forest". He always welcomed improvisations and inputs from the actors. Every disturbance, every diversion was welcome; these he tried to integrate into his play. He worked on the dramaturgy, conception and the frame of a play. But, he never interfered with the process of an actor developing a role. "When I first met him he was narrating anecdotes and stories to put the actor (me) on the right track. From then on, we just started to get acquainted as an actor and a director. It was a very important orientation in my acting career."

On whether theatre should be given back to the actor in an age when technology has tended to overwhelm the actor, Wuttuke was very clear. "Theatre should be open to all kinds of influences. To shy away from what technology can offer to improve theatre would not be a good idea. It is there to enhance his own acting to give better visibility to him. But an actor on stage has to try and forget these apparatuses and not hold on to the mechanisms internally."

Wuttke said he was against "realistic" acting. In fact, both of us agreed that there is no such thing as "reality". As each one's reality is different from another's, using the term in acting becomes meaningless. Improvisation, being an important tool in acting, how can one think of imitating reality? At best, it would only be an abstraction of each one's reality. Wuttuke smiled and added: "I wish you had come with us to Los Angeles, where the people used to the Hollywood style of realistic acting were stunned with my kind of acting." I observed that even if one cannot follow the language of the script of "Arturo Ui", one can still appreciate the theatrical quotient; This, I feel is mainly due to Wuttke's acting which is very visual and therefore paints a picture of Ui succinctly. Of course, if one can follow the language, the theatre experience becomes more meaningful.

There will be six performances of the play between January 16 and February 1, 2001.

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