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.