According to Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, the joint authors of Young Marx, it does so within the same play.
Young Marx is set in 1850, a fallow period in Marx’s life, two years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto and 17 years before the first volume of Das Kapital.
He and his family are living in Soho, subsidised in part by his wealthy associate Friedrich Engels and, in part, by pawning his aristocratic wife’s family silver.
Bean and Coleman play fast and loose with history: forgivably amalgamating Marx’s children and claiming that he was the father of his housekeeper’s illegitimate son (which has never been proven); less forgivably making Marx take part in a duel of honour with a fellow communist, August von Willich, when the challenge was political and Marx refused to fight.
At its best the play offers a vivid portrait of Marx’s chaotic family life at a time when he was destitute, drunk and disillusioned.
Its tone, however, is confused: neither Marx and Engels’ impassioned speeches on the fate of the poor and Parisian revolutionaries, nor the tragic death of Marx’s infant son, sit comfortably alongside farcical scenes of fisticuffs in the reading room of the British Museum and of Marx hiding from bailiffs in a cupboard.
Nicholas Hytner’s lively production on Mark Thompson’s atmospheric set does its best to yoke together these disparate elements.
Rory Kinnear manages to make even the grossly insensitive Marx sympathetic.
Nancy Carroll is excellent as ever as his long-suffering wife.
Oliver Chris is the picture of forbearance as the endlessly supportive Engels, and there is strong support from Laura Elphinstone and Eben Figueiredo.
Young Marx is the first production at the splendid new Bridge Theatre, which aims to shift London’s theatrical hub from the West End to the East.
Marx might not have approved of its location among gleaming tower blocks, but I was greatly taken by its elegance, spaciousness, and comfortable seats.
We are on more familiar territory, both dramatically and topographically, with Nicholas Wright’s eloquent and sensitive adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s unjustly neglected novel, The Slaves Of Solitude.
John Schlesinger’s Yanks meets Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables as two exotic foreigners, an American GI and a German refugee, cause consternation among the residents of a genteel boarding house in wartime Henley-on-Thames.
In particular, they ruffle the cosy existence of prim-and-proper Enid Roach, a publisher’s reader, whose sole experience of love has been an adulterous affair with her boss.
Fenella Woolgar beautifully delineates Enid’s longing to be more than she is and fear that she has left it too late.
Daon Broni and Lucy Cohu excel as the GI and the refugee and there are delightful comic vignettes from Clive Francis, Gwen Taylor, Amanda Walker and Richard Tate.
They play four elderly lodgers whose lives are as faded and frayed as the furniture in Tim Hatley’s richly evocative set.
Jonathan Kent directs with an impeccable eye for emotional truth and period detail.
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