Dog Eat Dog - Martin Wuttke as Arturo Ui

I went to see the Berliner Ensemble at UCLA in 1999 because I had heard that it was their last tour. Or their last show. Or their last Brecht show. Or the artistic director was leaving. I was sure it was their last something. In hindsight, it was certainly not their last show, because they are still in Berlin.

Maybe it was just my last misunderstanding.

They were performing The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written by Brecht and directed by Heiner Müller. What could be better than watching the Berliner Ensemble perform Brecht?

Heiner Müller

Heiner Müller, playwright and director, is perhaps the most important German theatrical figure of the Twentieth Century after Brecht, and sometimes compared to Samuel Beckett.

Müller gave one of my favorite quotes ever, when he was asked to comment on his reputed status as a post-modern playwright. He said, “The only postmodernist I know of was August Stramm, a modernist who worked in a post office.”

However, Müller was directing here.

Arturo Ui is a Hitler allegory, which Brecht wrote in 1941. It follows the exploits of a small-time gangster (Ui) who uses violence and coercion and murder to rise to the top of gangland Chicago in the 1930s. Its biting satire is both a parody and a condemnation of Hitler’s rise to power.

I would like to talk about the virtuoso performance of Martin Wuttke, who played the title role. This was one of those performances where I sat there in the theatre and thought, “Wow, I won’t ever see anything like this again.”

Martin Wuttke would actually play Hitler ten years later in Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds. But watching that performance, like all movie performances, will give you no idea of what he was like on stage. Although Wuttke did movies and German TV, he was a theatre actor first and foremost, all the way to his bones. In Germany, as in most of Europe, it is easier to move back and forth regularly between film and theatre, because the disparity of what each pays is much smaller. 

Here, not so much. In the USA it’s like David and Goliath.

The play starts with Ui being a small-time gangster ends with him being the most powerful man in Chicago, ready to conquer the world.

In the first scene of the play, there is a meeting of grocery business owners who are bemoaning their low profits. In the script, Arturo Ui is waiting outside to speak to them about offering them his extortion services.

It wasn’t enough in Müller’s production to have Ui start out as a small man and end as a powerful man. At the beginning of the Berliner Ensemble production, Ui isn’t even a man. He is sub-human.

A dog, to be precise.

Martin Wuttke as Arturo Ui.
Courtesy of the Berliner Ensemble. Photo by Barbara Braun.

Wuttke as Ui, enters the stage, wearing black pants and boots, naked to the waist, on all fours. He is panting with his mouth open and his red tongue hanging out, with crazed but glassy eyes. And for the entire 10-minute scene he circles the grocer’s meeting like a mongrel in heat.

Let me be clear. I would not liken this to an acting class exercise where you explore being a dog. We’ve all done something like that. This was the work of an actor who spent weeks if not months observing, detailing and embodying canine behavior. When he performed this scene, there was nothing human about him; there was nothing where I could see the actor at work, there was nothing that I could point to or admire his technique.

It was a terrifying scene. It was terrifying because his performance was so utterly unnatural. It was like possession. Or transference. And it was the visceral experience that you can only have in the theatre. 

Martin Wuttke as Arturo Ui and Margarita Broich as Dockdaisy.
Courtesy of the Berliner Ensemble. Photo by Barbara Braun.

And then, over the course of the play, to see this dog, not just become human, but become Hitler, was a profoundly disturbing experience.

There was another emblematic scene midway through the play – a comic one – where Ui goes to a famous tragedian in order to learn how to present himself to the public. In this 12-minute scene, the schlubby gangster tries and fails, under the tragedian’s tutelage, to stand, move, and orate like a powerful man.

Here, Wuttke’s performance smacked of the great clowns of silent film as he comically gets it wrong, and wrong, and wrong again. His body and voice are seemingly unable to respond to his own commands as he tried to emulate the tragedian’s directions, demonstrating more of Wuttke’s extraordinary physical and vocal versatility.

Martin Wuttke as Arturo Ui. At this moment, he is a swastika.
Courtesy of the Berliner Ensemble. Photo by Barbara Braun.

The sequence ends with an unexpected moment where Ui, having finally integrated his teacher’s acting notes, gives a harrowing speech to the audience. We have now forgotten all of the comic fumbling we just witnessed and are paralyzed as Ui now embodies the force and volatility of Hitler at Nuremberg. The effect is chilling.

This is the man who just an hour ago was a dog.

Martin Wuttke as Arturo Ui about to address the audience.
Courtesy of the Berliner Ensemble. Photo by Barbara Braun.

For me, an actor like Wuttke whose technique vanishes, is the epitome of the stage actor: the synthesis of body and voice and emotion and ideas. Which is the way every stage performance should be.

And what gave the opening dog performance added resonance is that it was called back by the final lines of the play. At the end of the play, Wuttke drops character and talks directly to the audience, which is how it is written in Brecht’s script. Brecht issues a warning about the possibility of another Hitler/strongman/demagogue rising to power. Wuttke, as himself now, says:

“This was the thing that nearly had us mastered,
Let’s not drop our guard too quickly then.
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”