100
SUSAN SONTAG
play
IS
high-spirited, cartoonish in its political ideas, and full of
playful literary parodies. Besides the strained parallel between the
Capone-type hero and his gangster lieutenants, and Hitler and his
entourage, Brecht will give over an entire scene to a parody of some–
thing from
Faust
or
Richard III
or a play of Schiller. Unconventional
sex and edifying subjects, preferably historical (like Luther or T. E.
Lawrence or Thomas More or Job), are almost all the Broadway
audience has yet been coached to see as subjects of serious drama. Brecht
is
too
witty. He has not been marketed and sold properly, though I'm
sure he will be.
The characteristic thing about Richardson's production of
Arturo Ui
was its patchwork extravagances, so much better than this same director's
smooth, homogenized staging of
Luther. Arturo Ui
was grimly bad at
times, in the worst Broadway social-seriousness manner-as in the speech
of the Negress who crawls along the curtain begging, in the name of
humanity, that Arturo be stopped. (The most memorable instance of
this type of lame attempt to coerce an audience is the "Attention must be
paid!" speech of Willy Loman's widow at the end of
Death of a Sales–
man.)
Another embarrassing moment was the Shakespearean ghost
soliloquy of the murdered Emesto Roma-Ernest Roehm-helplessly
delivered by Murvyn Vye stripped to the waist and smeared with what
looked like mercurochrome. And the abominable doggerel translation (or
adaptation, as it was called in the program) by George Tabori didn't help
much, either. What the production had, however, was two great assets.
One was the splendid performance of the title role by the Canadian
actor, Christopher Plummer. The scene of the elecution lesson, in which
all the familiar body idioms of Hitler are assembled, one by one, was a
brilliant piece of acting; as was Ui's final speech, representing the 1934
Nuremberg rally. (Plummer's, rather than Finney's, is the perform–
ance of the season.) The other asset of the production was a taste for
lusty stage effects.
Arturo Vi
had the courage to be vulgar, to assault
its audience-and sometimes it worked. The entire stage was framed
by a width of flashing lights, which lit up at the beginning and
end of each scene. Guns that were fired onstage sent off a rich acrid
smell and a visible yellowish smoke drifting about the auditorium. The
best moment was in the opening of the scene which is supposed to
represent both the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the Roehm purge,
when Arturo and his cohorts arrive at the garage. Their car drives
onstage and a pair of blinding headlights shines for several moments
right into the audience's eyes.
What particularly damaged
Arturo Ui,
however-and most plays
