CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Dodgy cartoon Marx
ANGUS REID mulls over the bizarre rationale behind the desire to set the life of Karl Marx to music
COMICSTRIP OPERA: Roland Wood as Karl Marx in Jonathan Dove's Marx in London!
[James Glossop]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Marx in London!
Theatre Royal, Glasgow
JONATHAN DOVE’s operetta Marx in London! covers more or less the same ground as Howard Zinn’s 1999 play Marx in Soho, compressing into a single day in 1871 a heady mix of domestic trials (infidelities, repossessions and extra-marital children), eminent figures (Engels, Eleanor Marx and the anarchist Bakunin for Zinn, the fictional socialist Melanzone for Dove) and political events (the 1871 Paris Commune).
But if Zinn’s one-man show is an exhilarating defence of socialism by a committed activist and aimed at the present day, so Dove’s is a farce that fixes the attention of the audience on its own cleverness, that shuns politics, and aims at an imaginary moment in the past that acknowledges Marx as memorable, but antiquated.
On one hand, Marx is as much fair game for a debunking as any other eminent Victorian: he is instantly recognisable, he drank, smoked and lived beyond his means, and after all, Philip Glass did Einstein, and John Adams did Nixon and Mao, as operas.
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