More champagne and madeleines!: Young Marx at the Bridge Theatre
Young Marx
Bridge Theatre
Gallery C42, £15
3 November 2017
Bridge page
I can imagine how Young Marx would have looked on paper like the right project with which to open the Bridge Theatre. A new play, London-set, from the team behind the super-successful One Man, Two Guvnors, promising light-hearted entertainment of broad appeal, yet with a serious message at its heart.
And yet part of the excitement when a new play succeeds is due to the real risk that it might have been rubbish, and Young Marx falls into the latter category. And when the play is rubbish the serious message at its heart becomes a problem: what needed to be throw-away begins to verge on the offensive.
So what’s my beef? Principally, that the story selected is so slight and ill-suited for drama that writers Richard Bean and Clive Coleman are left floundering. They’ve strung together independent set-pieces from Marx’s London life into an amalgam that has no dramatic cohesion, where the climax is only recognizable by its position in the evening. Further misfortune follows from the fact that the accidentally climactic event is actually really unpleasant (Marx trying to pass his mistress’s child off as the child of his friend) and highly unsuited for inculcating the air of light-hearted bonhomie for which the production strives.
Caught on the backfoot like this, Bean and Coleman provide a script constituted of jokes so lame not even a cast this experienced can make them sing, and shouty monologues lecturing the value of Marx’s work, emptily tossed around in archetypal champagne socialism. The audience is made complicit: audience and creatives, bourgeois comrades in arms, all feeling very righteous and good about ourselves, before emerging into the evening air in the beautiful surroundings of this new theatre, itself part of a magnificent luxury housing complex, ideally situated on the south bank, the lights of the City glinting across the waters. How ridiculous.
On the plus side, the set design by Mark Thompson is superb.
No comments yet.