Young Marx: a brilliant and unique thinker but an uncaring, unreliable hedonist and a liar to his stoic wife

Young Marx
at the Old Fire Station, Oxford
from November 1 to 4

Review by JON LEWIS

RICHARD Bean and Clive Coleman’s biographical play Young Marx, a drama that opened London’s Bridge Theatre in 2017, has been produced by Oxford’s Ronin Theatre, a company that exists to perform modern classics. Directed with panache by Alistair Nunn, the production attracted full houses throughout its run which proves the audience’s desire for quality revivals.

The writers of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, nicknamed Moor for his dark looks, and his buddy Friedrich Engels, are conceived of by Bean and Coleman as a kind of music hall double act.

A year or so after writing the Manifesto, a group of revolutionaries are living in London having fled Europe and are split into one faction supporting violent change and the other economic realignment.

Marx (Ashley Harvey), a dissolute, bearded man in his early thirties, and Engels (Josh Wedge), dapper and sprightly, are in the latter camp.

Marx relies on the Engels family fortune (Engels has managed his family’s factory in Manchester) to keep his family from absolute poverty.

The audience’s first sight of Marx is where he tries to pawn his wife’s inherited silver gravy pot.

In the first half, bailiffs remove anything of value from the Marx household but somehow Marx manages to afford the wages of his maidservant Nym (Ania Marie Ward) with whom he has a baby (after his own baby, nicknamed Fawksie after Guy Fawkes, has died), the playwrights firming up what has been hearsay from historians.

Marx may be a brilliant and unique thinker, with his acolytes such as the newspaper editor Schramm (Matilda Morrissey, a wonderful scene-stealer) even willing to take a bullet for him, but he’s an uncaring, unreliable hedonist, and a liar to his stoic wife Jenny (Ellen Publicover) whom Marx accuses of having an affair with his rival, violent revolutionary, von Willich (Matt Blurton).

When the German emigres are together, they speak with English accents, when there’s an English character in the scene, their accents turn Germanic; add in the brittlely viperous French revolutionary, Barthélemy (Alison Stibbe, hilarious) who always speaks as if she’s in ‘Allo ‘Allo.

A funny, and moving, production.