Peter Viney's Blog

Young Marx

by Richard Bean & Clive Coleman

Directed by Nicholas Hyntner
Designed by Mark Thompson
Music by Grant Olding

The Bridge Theatre, South Bank, London

Saturday 28th October 2017, 2.30 pm

CAST

Nicholas Burns – August
Nancy Carroll – Jenny von Westphalen
Oliver Chris – Friedrich Engels
Laura Elphinstone – Helene ‘Nym’ Demuth
Eben Figueiredo – Konrad Schramm
Tony Jayawardena – Gert ‘Doc’ Schmidt
Scott Karim – Mr Grabiner / Constable Singe
Rory Kinnear  – Karl Marx
Alana Ramsey – Mrs Mullet
Sophie Russell – Librarian
Fode Simbo- Helmut
William Troughton – Constable Crimp
Joseph Wilkins – Sergeant Savage
Duncan Wisbei – Mr Fleece / Bearded Man
Miltos Yerolemou – Emmanuel Barthelemy
+
Logan Clark / Joseph Walker – Guido “Fawksey” Marx
Dixie Egerickx / Matilda Shapland – Jenny Caroline “Qui Qui” Marx

Nancy Carroll as Jenny Marx, Rory Kinnear as Karl

The Bridge Theatre is hailed as London’s first new commercial theatre since 1937. It’s a 900 seater so large enough to be viable on a commercial basis, even though tickets range from £15 to £65 … you can pay double at the top end in the West End theatres. It was created by Nicholas Hyntner, who ran the National Theatre so well, with Nick Starr, and it’s in a fabulous setting. It stretches the South Bank’s theatrical area further eastwards. I’ll review the physical building later. I will relay the mumblings from the Globe about the “first new theatre in 80 years” publicity, pointing out that The Globe is not a subsidized theatre either and dates from 1996, with the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse opening in 2014. However, it relied on donations rather than being a straight commercial venture.

I’ll add that you could have got straight in this afternoon in the cheapest seats in the upper galleries (there are three tiers), though the stalls were full. So, like The Globe, it’s well worth trying for seats on the day.

YOUNG MARX

It’s a dream team, directed by Nicholas Hyntner, written by Richard “One Man Two Guv’nors” Bean and Clive Coleman, and featuring Rory Kinnear and Oliver Chris as Marx and Engels. Rory Kinnear was Hamlet and Iago in Hyntner directed plays at the National. Oliver Chris was Orsino in Twelfth Night at the National this year, but is best known from One Man Two Guv’nors and as Prince William in King Charles III.

I once did a third year course in Modern Ideologies and The One Party State at university. It was led by Dr Bob Benewick and ran from Marx through communism and fascism to modern African regimes. On his office wall were two huge posters: Karl Marx and pointing at him gleefully was Harpo Marx – I can’t find the image online that’s in my memory, and if you tell me it was Groucho instead, I wouldn’t argue. Anyway, the play Young Marx has Karl leavened with a strong touch of Harpo and Groucho.

The set is very National Theatre … they must have the same revolve stage built in. It’s a cube of soot-blackened brick walls with a roof with chimneys: smoking chimneys. It revolves and opens up to reveal a pawnbroker’s shop, the Marx’s living room, the meeting room above the Red Lion pub, the reading room at the British Museum. A screen descends with a misty park for a duel scene. It makes for seamless actions and transitions, with panels switching in the brick too, creating a church wall and a set of steps or handholds so Marx can ascend to the roofs to escape the police at one point. Full marx … sorry other reviews do that irresistible joke too … for set design. My companion pointed out that while it created the murkiness of 1850s London perfectly, all the greys, blacks and sepias left her eyes wanting some colour.

There is an accent decision. When the German refugees are among themselves, they speak in normal English (representing German). When they confront English people (so are speaking English), they switch to German-accented English. It works.

The play is set in Soho in 1850, two years after The Communist Manifesto and six years after the material in Marx’s The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (which wasn’t published until 1932). The latter is surprisingly readable.

Rory Kinnear as Karl, Oliver Chris as Engels, Nancy Carroll as Jenny Marx. Replacement furniture has just been supplied by Engels after the bailiffs took the last lot.

Karl is a penniless German-Jewish refugee living in abject poverty in two rooms in London. According to the excellent programme notes, Karl, his wife Jennifer, two children and their maidservant, Nym, all slept in one room. As the Marxs had no money at all, you wonder about the maidservant, but she had been with them for ten years. Marx is first seen trying to pawn the family silver, being pursued by the police who think it stolen, and escaping across the roof. He is constantly on the run from creditors and bailiffs, hiding in a cupboard every time there’s a knock on the door. This is Marx as Karl the Lad, getting pissed, taking the piss and having a piss against the church wall with Engels. And also, a line they missed, not having a pot to piss in.

 The facts as portrayed are true. Jenny Marx was sister to the Prussian Minister for the Interior. She was descended from Scots aristocracy. Friedrich Engels was the son of a Manchester mill owning capitalist, and he supported the Marx family with half his wages. In the play, by nicking it from the petty cash tin in Dad’s factory. The Prussian secret police were in London watching the German refugees. The angle on the facts is delightful. There’s a joy in seeing one of the august bearded icons of history as a bit of a rogue and rascal on a pub crawl. I think of Marx as the man who wrote that in a communist world, man would be free to be a hunter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon and a philosopher in the evening.

Marx and Engels are a double act, even breaking into song twice. I’ve seen Oliver Chris enough from One Man Two Guv’nors onward to be aware that he is a major comic talent. I’d only seen Rory Kinnear in serious roles, but he has natural comic timing and appeal.

Marx addresses the revolutionaries: the room above the Red Lion pub.

One review found the first act better than the second. We thought just the opposite … and the best plays should get better as they progress. There are some comedy set pieces throughout. In Act One, it’s the revolutionary meeting that breaks into a call for a duel and the duel itself. The duel is to be with Willich (Nicholas Burns) who fancies his chances with Jenny Marx. Willich is egged on by the vicious French revolutionary Barthélemy, a very funny and memorable cameo performance by Milos Yerolemou. We get lots of French translation jokes. Eban  Figueiredo plays Konrad Schramm, Marx’s devoted disciple (Karl finds him an irritation) who intervenes in the duel to save him.

Eban Figueiredo as Konrad Schramm

In Act two, the Reading Room at the British Museum is the scene of the play’s best moments. First, Karl meets Charles Darwin, and inadvertently suggests the title The Origin of Species to him. Then he has a blazing row in the library with Engels, resulting in the SHHHH! library joke, then into a massive choreographed punch up. Why the row? Well, Karl has been screwing Nym, the “maidservant” on the sly and has discovered she’s pregnant. He has told Engels who is furious with him, AND in the other wonderful Act Two comic highpoint in the flat, is persuading Engels to take the blame. The reactions of Nym (Laura Elphinstone) and Jenny Marx (Nancy Carroll) through the situation create a perfect four piece sitcom.

A word for the children … and I’m not sure which pair we had. Both are totally real in the roles… and I wondered if the daughter was playing the piano herself. I thought so.

There’s a running joke about the police not knowing their role … after all, the police were founded by Robert Peel just a few years earlier.

Just like (Marx) brothers … Engels (Oliver Chris) and Karl (Rory Kinnear)

The politics is sound enough to me. When I was fourteen to fifteen, we had a Churchill exchange history teacher from Pittsburgh. He was easily the best teacher I ever had at grammar school. We were doing 19th Century British history, and he wrote off to the Russian embassy and issued all thirty of us with free copies of The Communist Manifesto. I still have it. Unlike our British teachers, who believed history should be filtered through the wisdom of G.M. Treveleyan or Asa Briggs, he insisted we read original sources, and declared that you could not understand the history of the 19th century and early 20th century (in those days, history stopped at 1914) without reading Marx. Several parents complained. He was right, and at a guess quite right-wing himself. On original sources, the edition reproduces Marx’s appalling handwriting in a photo, noting that the first few lines are in the elegant hand of Jenny Marx.

The play is fortunately very light on dialectical materialism. At one point Karl wails, ‘I am not a Marxist!’ and indeed he wouldn’t have been. It took Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other evil swine to create the corrupt versions of his ideas we call Marxism today. He complains twice that his ideas are not suitable for Russia (If I infect that lot with the virus of hope, there’ll be perpetual conflict!). His analysis was based on industrial society in Germany and Britain. His idea of “communism” was Utopian, only achievable (if at all) after centuries of “Socialism.” They slip in a nice line when Marx says that in the future Christmas will expand from a single day into a week long festival of consumption. (He got that wrong. It’s a fortnight round here.)

Overall? I’d love to stretch to a fifth star … but four is right. There were a couple of flat spots, I found Act One rather staccato and it took me a while to get into it. There are two or three really old jokes tin there (My wife’s going to Genoa / Genoa? /  Of course, she’s my wife, and the piano one … You hum it and I’ll play it … for starters). I assume (hope?) they’re deliberately corny and meant to be accentuating Marx & Engels as Flanagan & Allan / Cannon & Ball / Morecambe & Wise.  Overall, it’s not as funny as the rollicking The Hypocrite from Richard Bean earlier in the year, but then nor is the subject matter. It has as much of Marx’s philosophy as I can take … not too much though. Others wanted more. Not me.

****

PROGRAMME

Full marx. Three excellent informative essays by Marx biographer Francis Wheen, and on Marx and Engels by Tristram Hunt, and Soho in 1850 by Rosemary Ashton. On content, the best programme this year.

THE THEATRE

The view from outside is straight across to the Tower of London, slightly right to Tower Bridge. Slightly left to the skyscraper jam in the city. Next door is The Ivy restaurant. A very short stroll through the tunnel under the bridge brings you to The Shad, a street of restaurants with chain ones like Pizza Express and individual Italian and French ones. They mainly have terraces on the river embankment. Only The Globe has such a pleasant setting.

The view from the front: Tower of London, Tower Bridge

Looking slightly to the left: thank goodness they didn’t build that lot behind the Tower of London!

I thought of The Ivy as an expensive institution, but our brunch of Avocado & Spinach Eggs Benedict with chips, came to £10.90 a head, and I’ve paid more in chain restaurants without the chips. The poached eggs were perfect, generous helpings of avocado. Great service. They won’t need a theatre restaurant then (there is a café in the large foyer), though the Ivy should do a pre-theatre set. Perhaps they will. The view is second only to the Swan Restaurant at The Globe.

Seats are very good, though Salisbury Playhouse has even better legroom. Rake is very good. The theatre is said to be easy to switch to different formats. This was all at one end, a curved open stage, with only a few seats on the slight curve. Apparently other formats will be used.

In an interview Mr Hyntner talked about the toilets … the National is comparatively good, but they still got complaints about queues for the ladies, and set out to have the best in London at The Bridge. They have got the best for London. Chichester is still better. There are toilets on each level, and wisely the men’s and women’s are on opposite sides, avoiding the situation where you can’t get into the men’s through the queue for the women’s (Young Vic, Almeida). They didn’t get it quite right. My companion came out talking to two other short women. They couldn’t reach the handbag hook, placed right at the top of the door (I’d always assumed it was a coat hook in the gents, but let’s not be judgemental). They also noted the “normal” toilet roll holders as inadequate compared to the usual “industrial scale” ones. She also said that the washbasins blocked the view so you couldn’t see which stalls were vacant. After we had that discussion in the interval, I went and counted in the gents. 18 urinals. Very good. The EXIT sign needs to be larger as the two black doors as you go out look identical apart from the small sign.

The lobbies have chilled water dispensers with taps, and plastic cups free. Brilliant. In other theatres, the jugs are usually empty, or they expect you to shell out £2 for a bottle.

The foyer is lined with compartments for interval drinks on a major scale. I suppose it is commercial theatre, but it meant we had people holding wine and beer right by us in Act Two. A friend who was a recovering alcoholic said he’d learned to walk through places where people were drinking, because you have to, but objected to sitting for an hour with the smell of wine and beer at his elbows. I agree. But it happens everywhere now. If I was running it, it would be “bottled water only” inside a theatre.

I see a couple of negatives. It is in a pedestrianized area, about 300 yards walk from Tooley Street. That’s rough for the disabled. Also, in a heavy rainstorm or snow, it’s a long way to go to get to a cab, bus stop or car park.  The Globe has that access road allowing a couple of cabs to creep up and wait 50 yards away. The Bridge is next to City Hall, so may suffer from the excessive power of the anti-car /pro- cycling lobby in local government. There must be loading bays at the rear with vehicle access though. Maybe the disabled can get in that way. If not, there should be provision. Through the tunnel to the Shad may be easier, if so sign it.

WHAT THE PAPERS SAID:
4
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Paul Taylor, The Independent, ****
Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard **** (“high marx”)
Sam Marlowe, The Times ****
Simon O’Hagen, Radio Times ****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ****
3
Michael Billington, The Guardian ***
Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times, ***
Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, *** (“low marx”)
Natasha Tripney, The Stage ***
Robert Gore-Langton, Daily Mail online, ***
Neil Norman, Daily Express ***

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

RICHARD BEAN (writer)
The Hypocrite, RSC 2017
One Man Two Guv’nors, 2012
Pitcairn, Chichester Minerva Theatre, 2014
The Hypochondriac, Bath Theatre Royal, 2014

NICHOLAS HYNTNER (director)
Othello, National Theatre, 2013
Hamlet, National Theatre, 2010
People, by Alan Bennett, National Theatre on tour 2013

RORY KINNEAR
Othello, National Theatre, 2013 (Iago)
Hamlet, National Theatre, 2010 (Hamlet)
The Imitation Game (film) (Detective Nock)

OLIVER CHRIS
King Charles III, TV version, 2017
Twelfth Night, National Theatre 2017
Fracked! Or Please Don’t Use The F-Word, Chichester 2016
King Charles III, 2014
One Man Two Guv’nors 2013

TONY JAYAWARDENA
Twelfth Night, Globe 2017
The Tempest, RSC 2016
The White Devil, by John Webster RSC 2014
The Roaring Girl, by Dekker & Middleton RSC 2014
Arden of Faversham – RSC 2014

NANCY CARROLL
Woyzeck, by Buchmer, OLd Vic, 2017
The Magistrate, NT live

LAURA ELPHINSTONE
The White Devil, by John Webster RSC 2014

EBAN FIGUEIREDO
Pitcairn, Chichester Minerva Theatre, 2014

SCOTT KARIM
The Country Wife, Chichester 2018
Young Marx by Richard Bean & Clive Coleman, Bridge Theatre 2017
Imogen (Cymbeline Renamed), Globe 2016
The Merchant of Venice, Globe 2015
Othello, National Theatre, 2013