Marx in London! 
Theatre Royal, Glasgow

JONATHAN DOVE’s operetta Marx in London! covers more or less the same ground as Howard Zinn’s 1999 play Marx in Soho, compressing into a single day in 1871 a heady mix of domestic trials (infidelities, repossessions and extra-marital children), eminent figures (Engels, Eleanor Marx and the anarchist Bakunin for Zinn, the fictional socialist Melanzone for Dove) and political events (the 1871 Paris Commune).

But if Zinn’s one-man show is an exhilarating defence of socialism by a committed activist and aimed at the present day, so Dove’s is a farce that fixes the attention of the audience on its own cleverness, that shuns politics, and aims at an imaginary moment in the past that acknowledges Marx as memorable, but antiquated.

On one hand, Marx is as much fair game for a debunking as any other eminent Victorian: he is instantly recognisable, he drank, smoked and lived beyond his means, and after all, Philip Glass did Einstein, and John Adams did Nixon and Mao, as operas. 

But, on the other hand, Marx remains a threat to the status quo.

Marx in London! cannot acknowledge this threat, and in consequence doesn’t have the grand themes or tone of seriousness of Glass and Adams. Rather, it is full of slamming doors, mistaken identities and comic stereotypes, each of whom milk their own coloratura whether it’s as the “hot” virgin, the drunken wife or the boastful left-wing fake, and are served up alongside comedy policemen, useless spies, endless chases and flying cars. And the libretto bounces along in rhymes and couplets.

Mozart despised the operetta, in terms that fit this show, as: “dramatic abortions, miniature compositions full of bullshit in which one finds only cold songs and couplets from vaudeville.”

Historically in Britain, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan gave way to music theatre and rock opera as forms of reactionary popular entertainment, and it is curious that it is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s librettist Charles Hart (The Phantom Of The Opera) who has reverse-engineered the spectacle, in this case, backwards into operetta.

But why? 

The answer may be that Marx in London! was originally a German commission scheduled to appear in Bonn in 2018 on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, and that it’s raison d’etre is that it revisits the traumatic moment in German history in 1933 when Nazi taste decreed that Volksoperetten (nationalistic folk opera) must eclipse anything that smacked to them of decadence, Jewishness and jazz in form or content. The thrill of the commission, in other words, is that even though it remains resolutely trivial and bourgeois, the Nazis would have banned it.

From a Scottish perspective, however, it is hard to tell what we are watching at all. Slow panto? Charades with arias? An orchestrated graphic novel?

It is this last and patronising category that best fits the bill and which the 2D sets and projections emphasise, and if the plotting is cartoon-like with its lost jewels and drawing room slapstick, it also wants to be taken at least as seriously as Sondheim in its vague tableaux of workers, and its Sunday In The Park With Karl denouement.

But by gum, for a dodgy cartoon, is it well sung. Roland Wood bring a deep and soulful baritone to Marx, Orla Boylan and Lucy Schaufer duet thrillingly over gin as Marx’s wife and housekeeper, and innuendo fairly trills out of Rebecca Bottone’s excitable Eleanor.

The climax of Zinn’s play is Marx’s euphoria at the Paris Commune, and Dove aspires to the same in a large chorus of workers who storm the sleeping Marx’s dreams. But here they hold up entirely inoffensive contemporary placards — without even a Ceasefire Now! — and make no mention of working class self-organisation and the abolition of rent, one of the great achievements of the Commune.

Strange, how the one-man show packs more punch than the massed forces of Scottish Opera.

Runs until February 24, Festival Theatre Edinburgh. For more information see: scottishopera.org.uk