There are those who spend nights queuing for a ticket. After all, the Berliner Ensemble is mythologically big. As big as the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, or La Comédie Française in France. Monuments to cultural history, dedicated to one writer, like Brecht or Shakespeare, or to an entire history, as the French are used to. We Dutch have the Vondelpark, but plays are rarely performed there.
So when the Berliner Ensembe goes on tour (which they rarely do), with a unique staging of a piece by Bertolt Brecht, directed by the equally legendary writer Heiner Müller, you have to go there. Or you programme that, almost 20 years after its premiere, as a leading festival. So anyone who might have wondered why the Holland Festival brings in a play that has been seen for decades: that's why.
So the writer of 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Onion' has been dead for half a century, the director gave up six months after the premiere of his adaptation in 1996, and reportedly there were not the very best actors imaginable in the supporting roles on Friday night in Amsterdam. What hadn't changed, however: the lead role. And that was just as well.
Martin Wuttke.
Remember that name, if you didn't already know it from Tarantino's Inglourious Bastards or the recent film Cloud Atlas. Wuttke is rare good because he can do everything, and then something more. He seduces, he schmoozes, he fools and he moves, switching between those states at times when you least expect it. Such acting talent is why playwrights write and people go to the theatre. In this performance of Brecht's parable about the early years of Adolf Hitler's seizure of power, he is perfectly at home as Arturo Ui, the street urchin who, thanks to clever manipulation, makes it to Chicago's mafia boss.
The performance itself does not hold up. Heiner Müller refreshed Brecht's 1930s original to 1996 standards, and that was quite something. He stripped the work of all sorts of intertitles explaining what all the scenes stood for and were about. Müller assumed that his audience itself was smart enough to understand the similarity between the Reservoir Dog Arturo Ui and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to interpret. What remains as a result is a play that still contains mostly text. Text that is scanned loudly by most of the characters, and that makes following exhausting. There are no resting points, but above all: there is very little to look at. The exalted, formal acting of the German actors does not freshen things up.
Only one scene is really worth watching, and that is the scene in which street dog Arturo Ui gets media training from an older actor. Here it is about everything that works in theatre, and Martin Wuttke has the audience at his feet.
It is a great pity that the evening then drags on for at least two hours with a lone Wuttke among lots of headless chickens. We have to wait until the very last moment to know again why we go to the theatre for actors like Wuttke. He makes a Hitler salute to the applauding audience, but turns it into a waving hand just before the curtain falls. Talk about vile.
Whether, after missing this unique opportunity to see the Berliner Ensemble outside Berlin, you should still go to Berlin to experience the performance: it is up to you. Wuttke is worth the diversions, but the entourage will simultaneously give you a tough evening. On the other hand, it is also a sentimental journey will be to a Berlin past that is fast disappearing.
At the counter, for a few euros, you can buy the caps that Bertolt Brecht would also have worn. Of those things.
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