A little bit of politics, a super new venue and a lot of entertainment
Theatre Young Marx Bridge Theatre, SE1 ★★★★★
Before a single preview performance, Young Marx had already taken £1million at the box office – the kind of mind-boggling sum most West End theatre producers can only dream of when selling an untested piece of new writing.
The reason? Not a sudden Corbyninspired enthusiasm for all things Marx, but the prospect of theatrical sparks – nay, a full-blown revolution. This comedy is penned – or rather co-penned (Clive Coleman has had a hand in it too) – by Richard Bean, who gave us One Man, Two Guvnors.
It’s directed by Nicholas Hytner, whose gilded years at the National Theatre are already being talked about with a nostalgia usually reserved for the Edwardian era. But more importantly, it’s launching Hytner’s new £12 million playhouse.
Across the water from the Tower of London and a stone’s throw from Tower Bridge, the “Bridge” is billed as the “first new theatre of scale to be added to London’s commercial theatre sector in 80 years”. With a top-of-therange artistic programme promised at affordable prices, and all the mod-cons a 21st century audience might crave, it’s the profit-motive harnessed to socially benign ends. Theatre architects Haworth Tompkins have brought Hytner and his co-founder Nick Starr’s brainchild into being – both “parents” look delighted and there’s talk of more on the way.
The first thing that needs to be said is that the building – from foyer to loos – is a five-star triumph. And, as a means of showcasing the deluxe (but not insistently lavish) 900-seater auditorium – capacious yet intimate, with club-class seating – Young Marx can’t be faulted. The acoustics are top-notch and as mid-victorian London scenes spin into view on a revolve through the smog, it’s as if technical teething troubles have become a thing of the past.
The play itself? In some ways, it’s a victim not so much of hyper-inflated anticipation and the distracting novelty of the surroundings as its determination to give us the best time possible. The fascinating period in exile (circa 1850) that Bean has alighted on was actually the worst of times for the 32-year-old Marx: dingy rented accommodation in Soho, constant illness and continual debt. The brisk, two-hour evening attains pathos near the end with the death of one of many Marx babes, little Guido, spurring the resolve needed to press on with Das Kapital, but for much of the time it replays grim personal history as farce.
You might almost call it “One Man, Too Many Creditors”. Our first sight of Rory Kinnear’s bearded reprobate is at a pawnbrokers, trying to offload the family silver, his German accent (only apparent when he’s among the British) not helping matters. The Peelers are soon after him, and he’s shinnying up among the chimneys to get away – thereafter often found in a cupboard whenever there’s a knock at the door.
Bean never stops a gag getting in the way of a good story and, with Kinnear on up-rory-ious form (spot-on comic timing, plus that winning helpless thing he does with his face to assist his strangulated elocution) there are plenty of groaners that would have made even Stalin chuckle. “My wife’s packing, she’s travelling to Genoa,” KM says, in a nod to the real threat of desertion by his long-suffering spouse Jenny (Nancy Carroll, the essence of feminine resolve contending with laissez-faire paternalism). “Genoa?” asks his pal and financial helpmeet Friedrich Engels (a dandyish Oliver Chris), conceived almost as his double-act partner. “Of course I know her, she’s my wife.” Boom-tish.
It’s more end-of-the-pier than end-of-capitalism, and even intense political meetings and an encounter with Darwin in the London library have a supply of quips that outstrips demand; in the latter case, we even get a magic trick.
“A little bit of politics,” as Ben Elton (whose sitcoms, from Blackadder to Upstart Crow, this sometimes resembles) used to josh. We could do with a heap more, but put me up against the wall and shoot me if this entertaining show doesn’t provide ample grounds for a visit. The Bridge brigade has hit the tough ground of London’s ever-competitive theatre landscape running.
Until Dec 31. NT Live broadcast Dec 7. 0843 208 1846; bridgetheatre.co.uk
It’s more end-of-pier than end-ofcapitalism, with a supply of quips that outstrips demand