Glutton for Sinners

Bertolt Brecht had a touching Teutonic faith in the power of the blow to instruct. Almost all his dramas are displays of belligerent didacticism. The stage was his prize ring. The audience was his sparring partner. There he was--"poor B.B.," as he always liked to think of himself--lashing out with a bruising ideological left to the midriff, jolting the playgoer with some brisk truism to the jaw.

Brecht lived by what he always pretended to suppress: his sentiment bordering on sentimentality, the lyric-cynic play of his heart and mind, a vein of mordant humor, and his drink-drenched ability to keep one eye on the dawn and the other on the clogged gutter of life. He claimed that the greatest single influence on his prose was the Lutheran Bible, and there was something of the masked disciple of Christ in him. His Communism was basically a desire to multiply the loaves and fishes for the multitude.

All the Preacher-Teachers. Like Christ, he preaches to publicans and sinners, synonyms for playgoers. All the preacher-teacher-playwrights -- Ibsen, Shaw, Arthur Miller--are gluttons for sinners. They want converts streaming up the aisles to purify the world. They are all moral abolitionists who, despite their obvious love of the theater, confuse drama with reform and statecraft. They write Plays to Abolish Things By-poverty, prejudice, war, injustice, capitalism, moral obliquity. This is the dramatic form of preventive medicine, and it has never averted a single plague that mankind is heir to.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is Brecht's play to prevent Hitler by, or rather, future Hitlers. It is as if a public accountant were to attempt to sum up the nature of evil on a balance sheet. Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Roehm, under various aliases are presented as Chicago gangsters who muscle into a vegetable trust (the depression-ravaged German industrialists) and bulldoze the honest but senile leading citizen (Hindenburg) into legalizing their protection racket.

When Brecht's own Berliner Ensemble performs the play, the discipline and virtuosity of the company turn a somewhat silly drama into a comic nightmare. European experience underlines every speech with blood. But Americans tend to regard gangsters with nostalgic indulgence as individualistic resistance fighters against society (witness the vast popularity of Bonnie and Clyde). In the U.S., the play takes on the eerie quality of a faintly sinister success story, in which an immigrant boy from Brooklyn overcomes his bad accent and deplorable manners to achieve dominion and power over the second largest city in the nation. In the Minnesota Theatre Company's production, currently visiting Broadway, Robin Gammell is delightfully disjointed as Ui, but as a Nazi he is just a lovable softy. He couldn't throw a spitball at the teacher, let alone murder his best friend. By contrast, Christopher Plummer's performance in 1963 was chillingly demonic. The rest of the cast preserves the company's formidable reputation for inadequacy. It is just as well that Brecht did not live to see this production.

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