London has a new commercial theatre and everybody in the theatrical profession and regular theatregoers will be wishing it well and wanting it to succeed. The Bridge Theatre, co-founded by Nicholas Hytner and Nick Star, who ran the National Theatre so successfully, is on the South Bank between Tower Bridge and County Hall. The repertoire will be mostly new plays with an occasional musical and an occasional classic.
The opening play is Young Marx by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. Most people’s image of Karl Marx is based on Laurence Bradshaw’s bust on the memorial in Highgate Cemetery of a stern old man with a white beard. The 32-year-old Marx (Rory Kinnear) was a roguish Bohemian roué, boozing, swearing, procrastinating, sponging off Friedrich Engels, the cotton lord communist, and cheating on his wife. Having been exiled from France, Belgium and Prussia, he had arrived in England in 1850, when London was awash with refugees. He lived in poverty and squalor in Dean Street in Soho and spent much of his time hiding in a cupboard and up a chimney from creditors, bailiffs, German spies and the police. The episodic script has lots of jokes, Kinnear is an engaging actor, and Bean swears that what we are witnessing is almost all true.