What is the secret of Brecht's survival? In part, the fact that he wrote great roles for actors. Arturo Ui, a murderous Chicago racketeer who evokes Adolf Hitler and echoes Richard III, stands alongside Mother Courage and Galileo as one of the juiciest roles in the dramatic canon. In Jonathan Church's breathtaking revival, it gets a performance of memorable comic demonism from Henry Goodman.

Goodman's skill lies in showing how Ui grows into a monstrosity. Like Leonard Rossiter in a legendary 1967 revival, he first enters through a paper screen, bits of which cling ignominiously to his teeth. Hunched, shabby and despised, Ui is transformed only when he takes lessons in deportment from a ham Shakespearean actor (a wonderfully self-mocking Keith Baxter). Placing his hands in front of his genitals, shooting his legs out like pistons and stumbling through Mark Antony's speech in the Forum, Goodman not only makes us laugh: through the manic, sidelong glances he shoots at the mirror, he shows Ui turning into a legend in his own mind.

This is a classic Brechtian performance, one in which we relish the actor's technique while absorbing the points it is making. What Goodman shows, aided by Alistair Beaton's shrewd tweaking of George Tabori's translation, is how Ui moves from nerdy thug to raging tyrant through a mixture of intimidatory violence, economic collapse and oppositional failure. Although there is savage humour in Ui's satanic wooing of Betty Dullfoot, whose husband he has just killed, Goodman gradually wipes the smile from our faces. By the time he ascends a giant podium, Ui has become Hitler in all but name; and Brecht's famous final line warning us that, even if Hitler is dead, "the bitch that bore him is in heat again", acquires chilling resonance at a time when extremist movements are on the rise throughout Europe.

Like Goodman's dazzling performance, Church's production evolves in the course of the evening. It starts with jolly jazz in a Chicago speakeasy and ends by showing how protection rackets become a metaphor for political evil. There is fine work from Michael Feast as a vehement mobster in two-tone shoes, Joe McGann as a hatchet-faced thug and Lizzy McInnerny as Ui's powerless female prey. The play has the occasional longueur, and it helps if you realise that Ui's key lieutenants are precise replicas of Goering, Goebbels and Röhm. But you don't have be an expert on the Third Reich to get Brecht's key point: that over-reaching power is always resistible.

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This is, as it should be, terrifying. Brecht wrote it in 1941 as a parable to the rise of Hitler, satirically set among Chicago gangsters cornering the cauliflower trade. It is a deliberately comic vegetable, and the trilbied men sitting around a jazz trio as we wander in have a spuriously glamorous Guys and Dolls air singing “Daddy git your baby outa jail!” With referential slyness, the trumpeter briefly plays Wagner.

Arturo Ui in Henry Goodman, and from his first eruption through a Scarface movie poster, he is different, dangerous. No more jazz now. Brecht’s Führer is no superman but a schmuck, a little man: the message is that his progress should have been resistible, even with the Depression economics established in the gangsters’ chat. George Tabori’s translation, tweaked by our own Alistair Beaton, makes the paradox clear: uncertainty, fear and laziness can promote bad leaders who then become immovable. Ask any Syrian. A poignant expression is the dying speech of the city boss Dogsborough, movingly played by William Gaunt and representing President von Hindenburg. After the list of Ui’s crimes (which also symbolically follow history) the old man admits ‘I knew everything. I knew it all, and yet I let it happen.’

Ui is hunched, a high collar making him neckless, Goodman’s distinguished looks swamped by scowls, paranoid twitches and black moustache. His secret, he says, is ‘Faith! Faith itself!’
 ‘And a gun?’ says a henchman. But Ui shouts ‘No!’ Guns do rattle horribly in his service, but his fuel is that nervous, savage, pitiless energy. It is a superbly horrible performance, even in comic moments: Hitler’s rhetoric is evoked in a lovely scene with Keith Baxter as a moth-eaten Shakespearean actor teaching him to project, and his paranoia is rendered with awful hilarity when he springs around the piano, frightened by every sound. Yet Goodman straightens, grows authority and the sinister red armband. The death of the conspirators against him is stark, his annexation of Betty Dullfoot after he murders her husband as shocking as Richard III’s wooing of Lady Anne. Lizzy McInnerny’s frozen, resentful fear chills the little theatre.

At last the high Nuremberg podium advances onto a bare stage and the crowd populace must applaud or die. Jonathan Church’s production is by now so stark that is seems impossible we will be able to applaud. But with Brechtian detachment Goodman’s moustache and armband are suddenly shed, and he speaks with heartshaking sincerity Brecht’s warning ‘the bitch that bred him is in heat again.’ There follows a coup de theatre so dark, so simple, that the gasps around me curdled the air.