Given the abundance of theatre in London, is the opening of this new playhouse a Bridge too far? Not at all. As the first wholly commercial theatre to be built in the capital in 80 years, it makes an instantly good impression. Costing £12.5m, it occupies a prime site on the south bank of the Thames, and has a large, welcoming foyer and a flexible 900-seat auditorium with excellent sightlines. Even the ticket prices, ranging from £15 to £65, are reasonable by today’s standards.
The declared policy of the theatre’s founders, Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, is to focus primarily on new plays. That inevitably carries an element of risk, but they kick off with a pugnacious comedy by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman that, invoking the name of Marx, attempts to synthesise the spirits of Karl and Groucho. Mention Karl Marx and most of us think of Das Kapital and that massive leonine bust in Highgate cemetery. But Bean and Coleman focus on Marx as he was in 1850: a 32-year-old German Jew living in penurious exile on Soho’s Dean Street with his wife, Jenny, their children and a devoted maid. Hounded by creditors, harried by the police and at odds with many of his fellow revolutionaries, Marx largely survives through the beneficence of his friend, Friedrich Engels.
The play is out to demystify Marx, and in this it is largely successful. The Marx we meet is devious, quick-witted and funny. Describing his wedding to the aristocratic Jenny von Westphalen, he says: “It was a traditional Prussian affair – military uniforms, guard of honour, firing squad.” He and Engels also suggest their complicity by falling into the rhythmic patterns of a music-hall double act. For all his acts of casual cruelty to a wife he deeply loves, Marx emerges as a boisterous father, a natural life-enhancer and a bit of a piss artist, whose aim is to have a pint in every pub in Tottenham Court Road.
At one point, however, Engels reproachfully says to Marx: “I write down what I see. I’m a beta-plus. You’re an alpha, a bona fide genius, you prick.” I wish the play gave us more evidence of that genius. There’s a powerful scene when Marx passionately argues that revolution in Britain will come through an economic crash rather than through acts of random violence. When Marx finds metonymic meaning in a breakfast sausage and goes on to claim there will come a time when Christmas is “a week-long festival of commodification”, the audience is roused to sympathetic applause. But while the play is clearly designed to humanise Marx, it undersells his ferocious activism which, even in 1850, included giving courses of lectures on “What is bourgeois property?”, assisting German political refugees and beavering away in the British Museum reading back numbers of the Economist.
Hytner’s production and Mark Thompson’s design are faithful to the play’s farcical structure, with much hiding in cupboards and chasing over rooftops. Rory Kinnear also catches very well the ambivalence of Marx, the political visionary who is also a shameless sponger and the radical dreamer haunted by self-doubt. Engels is actually the more sympathetic figure, and Oliver Chris plays him as an obliging cash cow with a genuine rage against poverty. Nancy Carroll as the put-upon Jenny, Laura Elphinstone as the tragically devoted maid and Tony Jayawardena as a bumptious quack give excellent support. But while I enjoyed the evening, I felt that Bean and Coleman, in underplaying the hero’s piercing analysis of capitalist contradiction, had not quite given us the full Marx.
• At the Bridge, London, until 31 December. Box office: 0843-208 1846. To be broadcast on National Theatre Live on 7 December.
