Marx in London!, review: the father of Communism’s life reinvented as a sitcom – and it’s great fun
Karl Marx’s grave dominates Highgate Cemetery in London (and it is said that you will soon be able to book a nearby plot for a mere £25,000), but his house at 41 Maitland Park Road a mile or so down the road has long been swept away by a post-war Camden housing estate. It is here wittily recreated by designer Yannis Thavoris as a pocket music-hall with footlights, full of clever effects such as floating furniture, for this inaugural UK staging of Jonathan Dove’s opera Marx in London!
First performed at the Stadttheater in Bonn back in 2018, it has taken a long time to come here, and London audiences have also had the chance to see the Richard Bean play Young Marx, which opened the Bridge Theatre. Whether the two projects are interrelated is not clear, but they share a lot in terms of drawing the contrast between Marx’s serious political thought and his chaotic family life in a semi-farcical scenario. The libretto for Dove’s opera is by experienced lyricist Charles Hart; aptly for its late-Victorian setting, it has a lot of bouncy, WS Gilbert-style rhymes that propel the action along.
But the basic scenario here doesn’t quite take off: Marx (the gruff Roland Wood) is in debt, the family silver and furniture are being impounded, and he is trying to write philosophy while torn between his wife Jenny (the imposing Orla Boylan) and his mistress housekeeper Helene (an eloquent Lucy Schaufer). There is then the sub-plot of Marx’s daughter Tussi, a frightening coloratura soprano delivered with huge aplomb by Rebecca Bottone, and the young Freddy (William Morgan, by comparison a little underpowered) who is looking for his family with no more help than an old napkin ring he was left. Needless to say, Tussi and Freddy turn out to be related, fortunately before their mutual attraction has gone too far.
Add in comic policemen, a rival politico Melanzane (Paul Hopwood), a spy and Friedrich Engels (a nice cameo from Alasdair Elliott), and you have the recipe for enjoyable mayhem. Dove and Hart make the most of the set-pieces: a political meeting in a pub, research in the British Museum, an assassination attempt in Maitland Park, while engravings of old London roll past on the set.
It’s not quite clear what it is meant to add up to, however, while Dove’s fluent music in his habitually eclectic mode is exceptionally referential, drawing on a wide range of operatic influences: surely only he could knit together memories of the end of Britten’s Peter Grimes and the beginning of Adams’s Nixon in China quite so outlandishly. Several characters, such as Jamie MacDougall’s spy, are musically well-characterised by the large Scottish Opera orchestra under David Parry’s busy direction; oddly, in spite of Roland Wood’s energy, the music for Marx himself comes across as less memorable.
Stephen Barlow’s direction is sharp-edged and energetic, and the cast tumbles around effectively – but to what effect? The urgent political message of Marx’s theory is reduced to a few placards, while the sentimental finale suggests they would all be better off with a picnic on Hampstead Heath.
In Glasgow until Feb 17, then at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh on Feb 22 and 24; scottishopera.org.uk
