The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Minerva Studio, Chichester, review You simply can't take your eyes off him. From the moment Henry Goodman's Arturo Ui bursts into view through an old film poster of Scarface to make his limelight-stealing entrance, spitting away the ripped paper residue from his face, he is horribly, hypnotically watchable. Goodman takes his customary finesse to another level in his hyper-detailed account of a Thirties American mobster who is unmistakably Adolf Hitler, as viewed through Bertolt Brecht's satirical lens circa 1941. His tour de force performance sketches not just step by step but almost line by line the growth of a grasping upstart into a near-unassailable megalomaniac. Director Jonathan Church hasn't missed a trick in casting him and Goodman doesn't miss a tic. He begins on a bravura note of Chaplinesque comedy, looking - despite his toothbrush moustache - like a diminutive schoolboy whose mates might turn against him at any moment. Twitchy, brooding, jerkily gauche of movement, he's almost afraid of his own shadow, absurdly jumping out of his skin when he drops a chair on his foot. Goodman has a terrific way of arching his eyebrows to look plaintive and vulnerable; there are shades even of his legendary, ill-at-ease Shylock. But the febrile exterior also contains exactly the right quality of vigilant calculation and mock-kindly consideration. As the play proceeds, charting the stranglehold Ui and his henchmen achieve over the cauliflower trades of Chicago and neighbouring Cicero (for which read Austria), Goodman introduces recognisable elements - rigid goose-steps, defensive arm postures, jabbing fingers, an explosive fury - that shift him by degrees from harmless figure of fun to glinting, fully fledged Führer. Crucial to that transformation - and central to the accusation the play makes against its audience - is the hilarious scene involving Ui's tuition at the hands of a washed-out Shakespearean actor, beautifully played here by Keith Baxter. As Ui crudely rehearses the grandstanding mannerisms of classical theatre, he arrives at the nascent OTT gestures of Nazism. Church grasps that Brecht's didacticism is at its most viciously accusatory when the evening is at its most aesthetically satisfying. There's no stinting on production values. Simon Higlett's tenebrous, black-walled flophouse setting is an illicit, noirish thrill. The pacing is superb, the mood spinning on a dime between the jokily insouciant and the deadly menacing. The 1964 translation by George Tabori, souped up Alistair Beaton, fizzes with verbal pep and clever couplets. The acting, too, is a cut above. William Gaunt brings a wonderful pained gravity to the compromised Dogsborough (Hindenburg) and there's further top-notch support, especially from Michael Feast as the hatchet-faced Roma (Rohm) and Joe McGann as the ruthless Giri (Goring). All in all, there's never a dull minute in a play that might easily plod and restate the obvious. We are wooed by relentless spectacle and our enjoyment is integral to the play's chilling kick. Come the end, when the auditorium is invaded by Black Shirts as at a rally, we have become a truly captive audience. Even if we wanted to resist, by this stage it's far too late.