A new opera composition is always interesting. Jonathan Dove’s opera Marx In London! may have premiered in Bonn in 2018, but it is currently on its UK premiere tour, produced by Scottish Opera. What is it like, and is it worth it?

Well, before the curtain rises, we have a London street with the exterior of Karl Marx’s house, and a proscenium arch with curtain over the doorway. This sets the tone for a rather arch performance, with cinematic elements and nods to comedic clichés – running gags of being smacked in the face by an opening door, or colliding with the person in front who has suddenly stopped. All is slickly choreographed by Kally Lloyd-Jones.

The story compresses actual events of Karl Marx’s rather chaotic and shambolic life into one day of mayhem and narrowly avoided disasters, opening with a rather flirty chess game with his housekeeper. Roland Wood makes a convincing Marx, with bushy grey hair and beard, and his repeated  ‘Not now’ each time his daughter Tussi tries to get his attention is clearly intended to convey that he is busy with Deep Thoughts, whereas the audience can see that he isn’t. It is also clear, from Charles Hart’s witty libretto, that his money problems are from expensive tastes.

It’s a visually rich production – the arsenic-green wallpaper is bedecked with paintings, the ladies’ dresses are fabulous. PJ McEvoy’s street view and map video is fascinating – where will they go next – and then it goes up in the air, evoking Terry Gilliam’s animations. The crowd scenes are evocative of My Fair Lady, and the first appearance of the enigmatic young man clutching a silver napkin-ring reminds us of Freddy Eynsford Hill in that musical. But all this is conscious, placing Marx’s tribulations in a clearly understood context.

The epitome of richness is Marx’s long-suffering wife, Jenny von Westphalen, who arrives in a cloud of dust and voluminous magenta crinoline with matching hat. Her exasperation with her husband, not least her horror to find her home emptied of furniture, her drunken duet with Helene, the housekeeper (Lucy Schaufer) “Another little drink’ (surely destined, given its lyrics, to become a party-piece standard), her highly-wrought emotions conveyed with clarity.

Daughter Tussi is definitely at the giggly teenager stage, and Jonathan Dove’s music gives Rebecca Bottone a lot of laughter and giggles. Hart also provides several double entendres in her flirtation with the enigmatic young man Freddy (William Morgan), clearly out of his depth in dealing with members of such a family, more so since Tussi suspects him of being a spy. There is one, of course, recognisable by his spyglass (Jamie MacDougall) as well as Friedrich Engels (Alasdair Elliott), who arrives (wearing wings) on a penny-farthing, and who, eventually, bails out the Marx family yet again.

In the British Museum Reading Room, Marx falls asleep and dreams of revolution; in his dream the workers of the world surround him, singing ‘Soon’ in good chorus-work. Later, in a pub, a renowned Italian firebrand gives a speech which offends Marx so much with its banality that he makes his own speech, wins money enough to pay off his debts and get his furniture back from the bailiffs, but splurges it instead on claret and cognac for the men in the pub.

There’s a happy ending, of course, a sunny evening on Hampstead Heath, with the chorus out en famille to take the air. It’s a good ending, reminding us that opera can be fun and light-hearted, as well as solemn and tragic. Dove’s music adds to that feeling. Sometimes mimicking a typrewriter, lots of horns and percussion, romantic harp, the chorus in the pub about money reminiscent of a similar song in Cabaret, this is clearly a contemporary piece and lyrical with it.