Skip to main content

Engels!: The Karl Marx Story

Discover 21, Edinburgh
Three stars
If the revolution starts at closing time, few took advantage of the licensing laws more than Karl Marx himself. Or at least that's how the inventor of orthodox radical thought as we know it is presented in Ben Blow's scurrilous little play, first seen on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe earlier this year. Blow's play is now one of the first shows to play in the much needed thirty-five seat Discover 21 space, situated in the equally necessary Arts Complex initiative that exists inside St Margaret's House, a 1960s office block.

Here, Marx is a randy old goat living it up in nineteenth century Manchester, with a much put-upon Engels footing the bill for all his excesses while being bullied into doing most of the graft on The Communist Manifesto. With much of the necessary first-hand knowledge of the lumpen proletariat provided by Marx's favourite prostitute, Molly, the absurd double act of Charlie (Marx) and Freddy (Engels) embark on a barricade-hopping road trip, as Marx claims immortality for himself.

With Blow himself playing a blustering, northern English accented Marx opposite Matthew Jebbs' Engels, the pair's travails fall somewhere between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in that double act's Road movies, albeit with political one-line gags aplenty. Even a musical hating Victor Hugo makes an appearance in the Unknown Quantity/Dubious Quality company's production. With able comic support from Rowan Winter and Johnny Dillon, this is a refreshingly cynical knockabout alternative if knowingly dubious history that hints at what might have been, if only those pesky contradictions inherent in the system hadn't got in the way.

The Herald, November 28th 2013 


ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
1 comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more