La Résistible Ascension d'Arturo Ui ・ Comédie-Française

Brecht was in exile in the United States in 1941 when he completed this play in which, as noted by Bernard Dort, the distancing effect is more than ever a “process of deconditioning and destroying ideologies”.

The German dramatist seeks to dismantle the mechanisms of Hitler’s rise to power by transposing the action to Chicago in 1930 with the crisis of the Cauliflower Trust. For Hitler and Al Capone, as for Nazism and the criminal underworld, the methods are the same: intimidation, blackmail, embezzlement, threats and murder, right up to and including grotesque and Chaplinesque elocution lessons so as to better harangue the crowds. “The belly is still fertile...” warned Brecht. More than sixty years after the playwright’s death, Arturo Ui comes down to us from the past and still speaks in the present.
The task of inaugurating La Résistible Ascension d’Arturo Ui in the Repertoire was entrusted to a historical figure of the Berliner Ensemble, Katharina Thalbach, the daughter of Benno Besson and Sabine Thalbach, an actress in Brecht’s company. After her mother passed away, Katharina Thalbach grew up under the protection of the company, particularly that of Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow and his successor as head of the Berliner. A renowned theatre and opera director, she expresses the epic breadth of this “political farce” in a staging free of dogmatism and in the tradition of these inspired thespians.

Creative team

Staging****: Katharina Thalbach
Translation : Hélène Mauler et René Zahnd
Scenography and costumes****: Ezio Toffolutti
Lights****: François Thouret
Choregraphy****: Glysleïn Lefever
Sounds: Jean-Luc Ristord
Music: Vincent Leterme
Artistic collaboration : Léonidas Strapatsakis
Assistant stage manager : Ruth Orthmann
Assistant scenography: Liccia Lucchese

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