PAUL BAILEY
YOUNG MARX
The Bridge, London’s beautiful, brandnew theatre, is situated by the Thames, between City Hall and Tower Bridge. It seats 900 and boasts a versatile acting space which can encompass an elaborate musical or a chamber piece with a small cast. Its founding fathers are Nicholas Hytner, the former director of the National Theatre, and Nick Starr, who with Katrina Gilroy have formed the London Theatre Company. The spacious building is the work of the architect Haworth Tompkins, collaborating with TAIT Stage Technologies on the imposing auditorium, which has perfect sightlines, comfortable legroom and good acoustics. The ticket prices are reasonable, too.
I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the play Hytner has chosen for its opening production. Young Marx is concerned, as its title suggests, with Karl of that name, and his time in London in the 1850s, when he was living in poverty with his wife and children and a doting maidservant in a single room in a boarding house in Dean Street. The writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman have elected to use these straitened circumstances as suitable material for farce.
To some extent, they were right to do so, as Marx’s most entertaining biographer, Francis Wheen, points out in the short essay he has contributed to the programme. The 32-year-old Karl was a shameless sponger and a drunken lecher with a minimum interest, as it were, in bodily hygiene. The future author of Das Kapital was a man you would never trust with your money. This absurd fact has been seized upon by Bean and Coleman, who milk it for all its worth and even beyond. They are intent on getting as many laughs as they can, which isn’t the way satisfying comedies and farces get written. The result is a performance of engineered hilarity.
Young Marx opens in a pawn shop, run by the appropriately named Mr Fleece (Duncan Wisbey), with the down-at-heel Karl (Rory Kinnear) attempting to hock a piece of silver marked with the crest of the Earls of Argyll. Mr Fleece wonders what a German tramp is doing with such an heirloom and gets an assistant to alert the police. A chase across the rooftops ensues. It’s the first of many. It must be said that Mark Thompson’s revolving set, which evokes dingy lodgings, meeting halls and the Reading Room of the Rory Kinnear turns Karl into a lovable rogue in
British Museum as well as the dimly lit Soho streets, is marvellously flexible and inventive. Everything seems to be lit in sepia by Mark Henderson, giving the effect of a series of Victorian photographs. The actual look of Hytner’s production, with November fog a threatening presence, cannot be faulted. It’s the content that seems flimsy.
The conceit of presenting Marx and his long-suffering benefactor Friedrich Engels, subtly and persuasively acted by Oliver Chris, as a song-and-dance act may have seemed promising on paper but it creaks with contrivance on stage. Every so often, Bean and Coleman remind themselves that they’re dealing with serious matters, folks, and give the brilliant Nancy Carroll, who plays Jenny von Westphalen, the aristocrat who became Frau Marx, the opportunity to express her anger and frustration with the husband she continues to admire, against all the odds.
They do the same for Oliver Chris, when they have Engels giving an impassioned speech about the plight of the poor in Manchester. But these are fleeting moments in this broken-backed play, where the farcical elements fail to blend with the profoundly discomforting ideas whirling around in Marx’s head. In Armando Iannucci’s nightmarishly funny, new film The Death of Stalin, the balance that eludes Bean and Coleman is sustained throughout, without undue emphasis. In Stalin’s Russia the surreal was almost the only reality.
Rory Kinnear is a frenetic farceur, making Karl Marx a lovable rogue in the process. The scene in the British Museum, in which Marx talks to a bearded man, who just happens to be Charles Darwin, ends in mayhem, with everyone screaming and hitting each other and executing pratfalls.
Knockabout stuff, of the crudest kind. Duncan Wisbey’s Darwin sounds very like David Attenborough at his awestruck breathiest. It’s a miracle he can be heard above the din.