Not with a bang but with a whimper

Bang! A brand new theatre has opened on the South Bank managed by the two Nicks, Hytner and Starr, who ran the National for more than a decade. Located near a river crossing, their venture bears the unexciting name ‘Bridge’. If these two adopted a child, they’d call it ‘Orphanage’. Visitors approach along the Thames embankment and arrive at a soaring cliff of glass whose revolving doors usher them into a large anonymous foyer. It feels like a student union bar or a bit of an airport. Dangling from the ceiling are dozens of light bulbs, their radiance muted with tea-stained shades that cast an absolving glow over facelifts, hairpieces and liver spots.

The performing area is a sort of Dorfman replica with the stalls expanded laterally to twice the size of the original. The 900 seats, made of leather and cloth, are comfortable and non-squeaky. Look down and you’ll see black lino speckled with Pollock-y blotches that might have been reclaimed from a Jobcentre. The inaugural show is a comic biography of Karl Marx written by Richard Bean and someone else. Up go the lights. A fat square block is revealed representing the blackened tenements of London in 1850. Marx and his young family are living in a Soho garret haunted by debt-collectors, police constables and crazy anarchists plotting to murder Queen Victoria.

This amiable show portrays the German revolutionary as a bumbling sweetie, a shambolic, debt-ridden sponger, fond of beer, cigars, and fornicating with the lower orders. When he impregnates his maid, he persuades his best friend Engels to claim responsibility in the hope of neutralising his wife’s suspicions. Nancy Carroll (under-used) is good fun as Marx’s irascible missus. Oliver Chris makes a dashing, hilarious and strangely athletic Engels. The title role is taken by Rory Kinnear, who is widely recognised as Nicholas Hytner’s first choice for any male role not accepted by Simon Russell Beale.