The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Leonard Rossiter and at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester

There's no end in sight to the Guardian's commemoration of Leonard Rossiter's career. A 1969 interview with him by Terry Coleman from 1969 has appeared on the newspaper's website.

It was published after Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the play that made Rossiter's reputation arrived in the West End:

In a way he achieves some of his Hitler effects by taking his own nervous tenseness and exaggerating it into farce. The tense posturings of Hitler derive perhaps from the angular way Mr Rossiter holds his own arms, from the stiff clasping of his own hands. Hitler spends the evening on stage in a seething fuss which is mostly Hitler but part Rossiter.

And, says Coleman, the play went on at the Saville Theatre "where it succeeded a long run of Danny La Rue’s female impersonations." That must have been Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty, which I went to see as an eight-year-old.

I saw The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in the spring of 1979. A review in The Stage (19 April 1979) reveals that the Phoenix was threatened with closure and there were fears it might be the last production put on there:

Nigel Bennett, grim-faced throughout, improves with success, as Ui. The gestures, the passionate outbursts, the deep gloom, and the unpredictability of the paranoid dic tator are evident. He misses the chance to ridicule the shabby gangster's early bids for power. ...

The entire open stage war trans formed into a vegetable market by designers. Peter Ling and Patsy Pearce. Slides succinctly outlining the Nazi rise to power intelligently anticipated that the younger generation could be unaware of its odious intricacies. But the extremes of menace and humour were not exploited sufficiently. 

Reviews in The Stage often turn out to have been surprisingly sniffy, but I still remember this production 45 years on.