YOU HAVE only until tomorrow to catch Joe Woodward’s gritty staging of Bertolt Brecht’s play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” with a tight team of players from Daramalan College Theatre.

The story sounds familiar.

Ui (Tak Emerson) runs a greengrocery protection racket in Chicago, but as the deftly-presented slide presentation shows, the  events parallel the rise and rise of the Third Reich, with characters like the gangsters Ernie Roma (Gabriel Sinclair) and Giuseppe Givola (Meaghan Stewart) thinly-veiled representations of Adolf Hitler’s henchmen Ernst Roehm and Joseph Goebbels.

Probably the most disturbing piece  of casting was that of Gabby Stewart as ‘Mrs Dogsborough”—obviously the weak, aging German statesman Hindenburg.

A lengthy series of  court scenes comment sardonically on official corruption, and the final parade showing headshots of latter-day Hitler-like leaders should send everyone out reflecting on modern parallels.

This production will doubtless have a deep impact on students who have performed in it, and that’s just what Brecht would have wanted.

“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”, McCowage Hall at Daramalan College to October 15. Bookings to trybooking.com