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.