Arturo Ui, Bridewell Theatre, London

Sanctimonious play diminishes Hitler to a petty thief

If you want to see Arturo Ui, I certainly recommend Phil Willmott's production. While hardly without flaws, it has some cracking performances. But should one be that keen to see it at all? Good plays are often underestimated when poorly presented; here, though, with no such excuses to be made for it, we can see the faults of Bertolt Brecht's work.

Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941, but commercial and political considerations kept it from the stage until 1958 (1961 in English), after his death. The title character is a parody of Hitler, here a Chicago gangster who muscles in on the Cauliflower Trust. Through blackmail, extortion, and murder, he not only controls the town's turnips and tomatoes but grabs more and more political power.

The main problem is that the idea of the Fuhrer as a petty crook, while daring once, is now a commonplace. Indeed, the play, by diminishing him with ridicule, diminishes his crimes as well. He appears no more than absurd and vulgar.

Another is Brecht's substitution of vegetables for bootleg whiskey as the key to power in Chicago. It simply gives us a Chicago in which grocers are intimidated instead of people in the liquor traffic – which, as a then-illegal trade with widespread public support, is a far more potent example of corruption.

Peter Polycarpou, as Ui, is too little the feral creature, too much the clown. But Peter Stenson is excellent as a straw-hatted businessman oozing benignity and chicanery in equal measure, as is Justin Deaville as a tough but gentlemanly prosecutor. Best of all is Kevin Moore as an actor with the unenviable job of giving the would-be Marc Antony some class.

The play ends with victims of rape and torture begging an unsympathetic English panel for asylum while we are asked why we're so indifferent to evil.

The irrelevance provokes the question: Are Hitler's murders now considered so trivial that they can be an excuse for free-floating sanctimony?