Gleefully silly: Scottish Opera’s Marx in London! reviewed

A bloke was working the queue outside the Theatre Royal, selling a newspaper called the Communist. ‘Marxist ideas, alive today!’ he shouted into the Glasgow drizzle. Was he part of the show; a Graham Vick-style touch of Total Theatre? In any case, he didn’t seem to be shifting many units. He might have been even more disappointed by the opera itself: Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, here receiving its first UK production, is a new opera buffa with Karl Marx as the protagonist of a gleefully silly period comedy.

Spectator readers already know that left-wing economic theory is intrinsically absurd, but there’s a wicked little frisson in seeing it portrayed as outright farce. The Marx family are at home in Belsize Park on the day their furniture is repossessed: the great economist can’t manage his own household budget. Spies buzz around and Marx’s headstrong daughter Tussi (Rebecca Bottone) sets her cap at one of them. Meanwhile Marx (Roland Wood, an absolute ringer in frockcoat and beard) gropes the housekeeper, pawns his wife’s silver and can’t sit down to finish Das Kapital because he’s a martyr to piles.

If that sounds a bit broad, well, yes, and all the better for it. The libretto is by Charles Hart (the Aspects of Love guy), from a scenario by Jürgen R Weber. Yannis Thavoris’s cheerful designs suggest storybook illustrations, and director Stephen Barlow makes hay with Hart’s goofy rhymes and improbable coincidences. Old-school comic stereotypes abound, including the battleaxe housewife Jenny (Orla Boylan, who arrives with smoke billowing from under her skirts) and the goatish, tricycle-riding Engels (Alasdair Elliott). There’s even a comedy foreigner, the Italian Melanzane (Paul Hopwood, in purple with a green cap – run it through Google Translate) who locks oratorical horns with Marx in a direct homage to Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

Sondheim came to mind a lot, as did John Adams (Nixon in China, flashing up in brassy neon).