LEO BOIX reviews Cuban poet Carlos Pintado; Mexican poet Diana Garza Islas; Mexican American writer and critic Rigoberto Gonzalez; and Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos
Dodgy cartoon Marx
ANGUS REID mulls over the bizarre rationale behind the desire to set the life of Karl Marx to music
ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership
JOHN GREEN takes issue with a mainstream novel designed to denigrate the GDR
New releases from Nadia Reid, Manic Street Preachers and Mathias Eick
ANNA SERGI recommends the first UK exhibition of a remarkable female photographer who studied the impact of mafia violence on everyday life
The bard tunes into the message crooned by the newly self-appointed masters of the universe
It is painful that Donald Trump used David Bowie’s music during his campaign when the singer’s work was directly critical of his politics, judges PETER KENWORTHY
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.
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