Marx in London! review – Dove’s opera is capital entertainment

Having invested in the original Bonn production of Jonathan Dove’s rumbustious Victorian political farce in 2018, it was bold of Scottish Opera to elect to create an entirely new staging for the work’s UK premiere. But taking control of the means of production – and handing them to Australian director Stephen Barlow, who staged the same composer’s latest opera, Itch, at Holland Park last summer – looks to have been a wise move.

Packed full of vivid stage pictures, Marx in London! is set on a single day – 14 August 1871 – like Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway or Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and uses known events from the political philosopher’s chaotic home life while he was working on Das Kapital at the British Museum. The kinetic designs, by Yannis Thavoris, with video by PJ McEvoy, recreate that institution as well as the Marx family home and a picaresque travelogue though Victorian London.

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Triumphant in the title role of Karl Marx is baritone Roland Wood, and, alongside many other company stalwarts, soprano Orla Boylan is magnificent as his long-suffering wife, Jenny, in her Scottish Opera debut. Rebecca Bottone handles the contemporary coloratura role of daughter Tussi with aplomb, and Lucy Schaufer delivers the low mezzo music of housekeeper (and keeper of secrets), Helene, with equal assurance.

Much of the orchestral score brings to mind John Adams, but there are also recurring spare syncopated themes, and big, lusher sections that fall less obviously into that post-minimalist bag. Across it all, conductor David Parry and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera are in immaculate form in the pit, precision details in the percussion, sparkling wind and brass and terrific ensemble in the strings.

Charles Hart’s witty libretto, full of clever internal rhymes and more than a few genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, allows the complex scenario of the opera to emerge with remarkable clarity. But it is the set pieces that really stand out amid all the meta-theatrical japes. The first act concludes with a workers’ chorus that introduces modern figures from political activism, Wood’s soapbox oratory in the Red Lion pub in act two dispenses entirely with the jokes and irony to set Marxist theory to music, and Boylan and Schaufer have a superb drinking song duet that is surely destined to become a popular party piece.