Review Young Marx

Young Marx
by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman

Kapital, My Dear Karl, Kapital!
https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/

Hey, it's Young Marx at the new Bridge Theatre, hot on the heels of Young Frankenstein over at The Garrick! The first season at London's latest theatre, a commercial venture but springboarded, some might say, from advantages gained at the publicly funded National Theatre.

This new play by former stand up and writer of One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean and BBC legal correspondent cum playwright Clive Coleman takes seriously Marx's dictum, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce". Even if the shift in tone to tragedy is in reverse order and comes quite late in Young Marx.

Before that huge beard, Prussian-born "the Jew" Karl Heinrich Marx (Rory Kinnear) is living in London in 1850 with his aristocratic wife Jenny Von Westphalen (Nancy Carroll) and their two young children, frail Guido, known as Fawksy, (played on alternate nights by Logan Clark, Rupert Turnbull or Joseph Walker) and feisty piano-playing little Jenny (Dixie Egerickx, Matilda Shapland or Harriet Turnbull). Also with last, but certainly not least, a loyal maidservant (Laura Elphinstone).

Constantly on the breadline, Marx is also constantly one step ahead  - often by hiding in cupboards! - of a Prussian spy (Fode Simbo), London bobbies (Joseph Wilkins as Sergeant Savage), the family's landlord and the bailiffs, pawning his wife's family's silver.

Meawhile he and his friend,wealthy industrialist patron and fellow political philosopher Friedrich Engels (Oliver Chris) form a political and (almost) a musical hall double act.

Hm, TLT prides herself as a reviewer with both a bourgeois and proletarian sense of humour (Yes! All at the same time!). My, how she and her exploited but cooperative automotive sidekick laughed many years ago when they read a cartoon version of Marxist philosophy.

Young Marx tries awfully hard to be funny and there are also plenty of facts and pseudo-facts (as far as  nittypicky TLT is aware, the allegation of an illegitimate child's paternity is unproven and, while Marx is commonly regarded as Jewish, he was a baptized Lutheran).

Obviously the story does insert details which are specific to the Marx household and its economy but over two hours and 20 minutes, we did wonder if other famous people could be inserted and loose and fast "facts" changed with little difficulty.

Young Dickens, for example, dashing like Bill Sykes over the roofs of Mark Thompson's rather fetching three-dimensional revolving set, complete with swirls of smoke from the chimneys. A Tiny Tim in Karl and Jenny's little boy Fawksy and Dickens's lover Nelly Ternan as the bit on the side? Yes, it's a different story (Marx stayed with his wife) combining fact and fiction, but somehow, there is something template-ish about this piece.

Indeed Young Marx struck us as more of a series of sketches, a League of Marxist Gentlemen, very well-acted, given pace by Nicholas Hytner's direction and the music of Grant Olding. But nothing particularly hilarious and side-splitting or insightful.

There was only one point where we really thought there going to be a humorous lift off with satiric bite - the arrival of a whelk stall owner gving a telling dissection of how she is bound in a torturous (read: privatised) economic supply chain. However, like Oliver Twist, we waited for more which never came.         

Still, it's a spacious, airy, pleasant new building on the South Bank and there's an extensive future programme of new writing including the talented Barney Norris's Nightfall and, next, its first foray into the classics with a promenade version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. So plenty to look forward to but needs dictate we give our verdict on Young Marx and it's an amber light. 

Review Kiss Me

Kiss Me
by Richard Bean

Brief Encounters
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/kiss-me/trafalgar-studios/
 
In this enigmatic and delicate one-act play Richard Bean reverses the film censorship in the years following the First World War.

While both the silent movies and the talkies eschewed the physical realities of intercourse in favour of the iconic cinematic kiss, the couple in Kiss Me find themselves subject to a different kind of censorship by the woman doctor who has brought them together. 

The stiff upper lip son of a manufacturer with interests in the West Indies  and a woman munitions' driver with a Louise Brooks' bob meet for the first time in her bedsit.

We spy on the couple, learning the surprising reason for the meeting. The play then runs perhaps a little predictably as writer Richard Bean divvys up the pair's background, but it would be churlish to give away the initial surprise.

Suffice to say the scenario involves a process, found in the bible and the subject of speculation and royal intrigues, recorded as practised at least since the 19th century, even though it may have been often carried out in an unethical rather than cooperative manner. 

The direction by Anna Ledwich and the performances of Claire Lams, demure in box pleat skirt, blouse and cardigan,  and Ben Lloyd-Hughes in city gent three-piece-suit, bowler hat and umbrella are seductive with the whoosh of almost a ghost story.

This seductiveness draws us away at times from some surely deliberate discrepancies.  Set, according to the programme, in the year of the Wall Street Crash, 1929, there is a time travelling feel to the script and social stigma seems more of hinderance than money.

There are also echoes of literary and screen references from Lady Chatterley's Lover to the apparently very-much-in the-future Brief Encounter. The man glancing at a fob watch and the simple but effective set design by Georgia Lowe with three large mirrors tarnished at the edges, behind a double bed, also seem to point towards the two Lewis Carroll "Alice" books.

There is, maybe, a very light touch subtext of travelling through political history as well. However the central preoccupation is also very 21st century.

Perhaps it's a piece which doesn't bear too much cold-light-of-day analysis as to how it all hangs together. Nevertheless, it did charm during our brief 75 minute acquaintance with it and it's a green light. 

Review The Mentalists

The Mentalists

By Richard Bean

Utopia Or Bust

http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/Tickets/TheMentalists/TheMentalists.asp

Imagine, if you will, a Finsbury Park bed and breakfast hotel room. It’s a bit grungy, a nylon bedspread on the double bed, a trouser press on one side, a chair looking like it comes from a hospital ward on the other. A TV mounted on the wall, an ensuite bathroom behind a curtain. A phone on the wall, a plate of meat sandwiches covered with cling film and bowl of fruit.

Rather different from the luxury hotel of the Greek finance minister, The Mentalists’ hotel room has no headed notepaper as far as we could tell. Nevertheless a joke about the Greeks seems now to have an added resonance in this 2002 play.

Enter two men. Ted (Stephen Merchant in a respectable stage debut) or “China” to his friend. He’s a boy-scoutish beanpole, skinny legs poking out of long shorts and short sleeved shirt, fleet manager in a cleaning products firm.  So far, so ordinary with a raft of credit cards even if they do bounce ... But then there’s his scheme, based on the “radical behaviourism” theory of a (real) dodgy social scientist to correct the world with a Utopian community. That’s if Ted can get at least a thousand people at £29.99 each (!!!).

Morrie (Steffan Rhodri hitting exactly the right reassuring tone) is the camp yet butch Walthamstow hairdresser who has agreed to film a promotional video for his friend. Seemingly more stable, he nevertheless has a side line in porn films and tall tales. Like a fluctuating stock exchange, his imaginary father in one fantasy “was the only British boxer to have boxed at every weight. He could put it on, lose it, and then put it on again. Chips.”  But also with material concerns: “Can we sort the money out first China?”

A mini-diversion: have you returned to this blog, lured again by a Twitter or Facebook link  and expecting a review in our modestly ;) inimitable style? Then, in a non-hairdressing way, you have been conditioned.

However if you are a stranger who decided to take Google for a walk and the belief ran through your mind spontaneously the premise of our review is attractive, you are an example of mentalism.  At least, simply speaking and if we understand correctly, that’s the difference between the behaviourist and the mentalist schools of psychology.

Industrial psychologist turned stand up turned playwright Richard Bean wrote this two hander,  as part homage to Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter,  for a National Theatre festival and there are plenty of gags to keep the laughter coming in this two act one hour and 50 minute piece. At the same time, it feels more gag led than character or plot-based and the production a little over-blown for an intimate fringe-type play. We even wondered at one point if it would have worked better set in California on the fringes of Hollywood.

Nevertheless, amazingly, Bean in this 2002 play, methodically directed by Abbey Wright, seems to have had a magic globe, with Ted mentioning a test drive in Iceland (predicting the 2008 financial crash?) and Morrie Cyprus (2012 financial crash?), followed by the uncanny cracks about the Greeks.

The plot when it does kick in feels rather contrived and goes for far fetched cliché, despite Ted’s plan having (an unmentioned) parallel in real life, the government “nudge nudge” agency

Even so, one could say every audience could conform to behaviourism (“Hey, it’s Stephen Merchant, it’s a Richard Bean play, I will laugh, it will be funny!”) or mentalism (“What the hell, know nothing about this, but at these prices it had better be good!”), so maybe in the end it’s two actors in a play riffing on theories. And then of course we the audience are being experimented on like lab rats or Pavlov’s dog. ;) A TLT mentalist or behaviourist (depending on your school of thought) amber light.