Stephen Barlow on directing Marx in London! for Scottish Opera: 'It has a kind of juvenile humour'

Next month, Scottish Opera will stage the UK premiere production of Jonathan Dove’s comic opera, Marx in London! Director Stephen Barlow tells Ken Walton what’s in store

What’s so funny about Karl Marx? It’s a question I put to Australian-born opera director Stephen Barlow, whose UK premiere production of Jonathan Dove’s comic opera, Marx in London!, kicks off Scottish Opera’s 2024 performance calendar next month.

“Yes, it has slapstick, it’s quite bawdy at times, a kind of juvenile humour,” Barlow acknowledges. “But like any comedy – a Mozart opera, a Chekhov play, an episode of Frasier – poignant themes emerge, light and shade, major key and minor key. Comedy is based on tragedy. The classic example is someone slipping on a banana skin. You laugh at their misfortune.”

Such is the promise of a major opera – premiered originally by Scottish Opera’s production partner, Theater Bonn, in 2018 – that charts a madcap day-in-the-life of the celebrated co-inventor of communism.

Dove and his librettist Charles Hart (of Phantom of the Opera fame) plunge us into the chaos of the family home in 1871 during Marx’s final years in London, a complexity of sexual intrigue (Marx lusting after housekeeper Helene under wife Jenny’s nose), financial ineptitude, and the great thinker trying to get Das Kapital written with encouragement and monetary support from close friend Friedrich Engels.

“What Jonathan and Charles try to do is dislodge the ‘isms’ and ‘ists’ from Marx’s name and just look at the guy,” Barlow explains. “Depending on where you are in the political spectrum, he’s either the bogey man of history or a kind of God. This opera sets that aside and just looks at someone full of everyday contradictions, a man who wanted to reorganise the world financially and economically, politically and philosophically, yet couldn’t even run his own house. He was inept in so many ways, a complete misfit.”

Barlow didn’t see Jürgen Weber’s original German staging, described in one review as “bright, rhythmically insistent and pacy”. In any case, the ensuing hiatus inflicted by Covid had since prompted Scottish Opera to ask Barlow to create an entirely fresh production rather than revive the original. “I saw a couple of photos to get an idea of what they’d done so we didn’t replicate, but it was immediately clear I had a very different view of the piece.”

It’s fair to say Barlow knows instinctively what works with Dove, having staged more of the English composer’s work than any other director. Scottish Opera regulars will recall their joint success staging Flight in 2018, based on the story of an Iranian refugee who lived for 18 years in Charles de Gaulle Airport, which also inspired Steven Spielberg’s film The Terminal.

Roland Wood as Karl Marx in rehearsals for Marx in London! PIC: James Glossop

Last year, Barlow directed Itch, Dove’s operatic adaptation of radio presenter Simon Mayo’s eponymous novels for Holland Park Opera. Others in the Scottish Opera creative team share a deep connection with the composer. Designer Yannis Thavoris worked with Dove and Barlow on the Jane Austen-based chamber opera Mansfield Park in Manchester. Music director David Parry conducted the Bonn premiere of Marx in London!

“Jonathan writes very intelligently for the art form,” says Barlow. “His work is deceptively complex, very detailed, yet so like Puccini in the way he understands the theatre. When he was composing Itch he would send me emails asking ‘How long would you need for this or that scene change?’ Composers don’t always think that way. He writes for the audience, not in a composer vacuum.”

Like so many of Dove’s scores, recognisable influences from Philip Glass to Britten and Bernstein compete for space within a framework of cohesive originality. What’s more, Marx in London! is substantial, scored for a large orchestra and chorus and a busy cast led by Roland Wood in the title role. “It feels like the biggest thing he’s written, like Verdi proportions, really muscular,” Barlow insists. “A real celebration and belief for the art form at a time when it’s under threat. There has to be new work, we have to be ambitious, and we mustn’t be apologetic about it.”

Will audiences learn much about Marx? “It’s like a court case. We’re presented with the facts and left to make up our own minds. Some will leave thinking he’s a great guy, others that he was a bit of a s***. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.” That’s theatre.

Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London! is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 13, 15 & 17 February, and at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 22 & 24 February, see www.scottishopera.org.uk