YOUNG MARX
Bridge Theatre, London SE1
Opened 26 October, 2017
***

The new theatre opened by former National Theatre supremos Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr by Tower Bridge is stylish and potentially inviting. Steve Tompkins’ design offers fluid open spaces and a nice long bar, lit by hundreds of bulbs shaded in crumpled mock-chiffon. The leather-trimmed seats in the 900-capacity auditorium look as if they ought to come with cupholders. The catering is by St John Restaurant (if six quid for an egg and cress sandwich seems excessive, luckily there’s a Marks & Spencer nearby), with their signature madeleines much in evidence on press night.

Whether this will all make the Bridge – which is, after all, some way off the beaten theatrical track – a place where people will go to see Hytner’s post-NT programming, or whether it will be somewhere for certain classes to have gone and to be seen, the future will tell; obviously, the star-studded opening beano didn’t offer much basis for conclusions on that score.

What can be said about the opening presentation is that it is rather surprisingly un-special. The pedigree is impeccable: direction by Hytner, script by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, a cast led by Rory Kinnear and featuring Nancy Carroll, Oliver Chris and Laura Elphinstone among others. Bean and Coleman find comedy as well as pathos in an extraordinarily accurate account of the thirtysomething Karl Marx’s debaucheries and depredations in 1850s Soho, from drunken mock-music-hall double-act songs with Friedrich Engels to a duel fought with a fellow member of the Communist League over the attentions of Marx’s aristocratic wife, regular visits from the bailiffs and the death of his young son.

However, a hook for all this does not begin to coalesce out of the ether until well into the second half, namely that all this humorous and tragical experience was necessary to prime Marx for the actual composition of his long-promised work Capital (or, as the play claims as its working title, Economic Shit). Until this becomes apparent as the end towards which Marx’s personal history is moving, proceedings all feel a little baggy and directionless. When Marx launches into a potted version of his vision of the imminent collapse of capitalism and a consequent proletarian revolution, you might think that a not notably left-oriented writer such as Bean might take the opportunity to work some material out of the differences between this 19th-century theory and the 21st-century reality of 2006-09, but not a discernible peep.

Kinnear’s comprehensive range of acting talents cannot dispel a sense that he is carrying the material rather than being fuelled by it; often Chris as Engels seems to have a better time of it. In terms of setting out a stall for the Bridge’s future work, it testifies to interest and intelligence, but this is not a project that has sprung fully armed from the head of its forebear.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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