Scottish Opera's Marx In London! and puppet story Ragnarok hit mark

It finds the great socialist thinker and ­activist beset by troubles and living a somewhat ­complicated personal life. Early in ­proceedings, it is established that Marx is still trying ­(unsuccessfully) to coax Helene Demuth (his longstanding housekeeper, and mother of his undeclared son, Freddy) into bed.

Meanwhile, his debts unpaid, the irreconcilable opponent of private property discovers that his own property (piano, furniture and all) is about to be seized by bailiffs. Add to that the ­carbuncles on his backside, which plague his work (often conducted in the reading rooms of the British Museum) on his three-volume ­magnum opus Das Kapital, and the world’s most ­famous revolutionary isn’t having the best of days.

READ MORE: Manipulate festival shows off fantastic range

However, those on the political right who might hope that the opera takes a hatchet to Marx will be disappointed. Dove’s Marx is a flawed, but brilliant human being – a source of comedy, but also of respect.

Rebecca Bottone as Tussi Marx (Image: James Glossop)

In many ways, the piece sits, appropriately enough, in the English comic opera tradition of Marx’s London contemporaries Gilbert and ­Sullivan. This fact is underlined by the ­gloriously colourful, hyper-real sets and ­costume designs by Yannis Thavoris.

From the Marx family home at 28 Dean Street (above which Thavoris places the iconic English Heritage blue plaque) to the British Museum and a workers’ tavern, every location springs from the stage with the vibrancy of a G&S ­operetta. The arrival – much feared by Marx (given the imminent seizure of the family’s goods) – of the great thinker’s wife, Jenny Marx, née von Westphalen (played gloriously by Orla Boylan) is a thing of comic beauty. Resplendent in a voluminous, purple dress, the aristocratically born Jenny’s grand entrance is almost Wagnerian, with more than a touch of Oscar Wilde.

There are shades of G&S, too, in the ­demonstrative brandishing of a ­magnifying glass by Jamie MacDougall’s delightfully ­caricatured Prussian spy. The comedy of Charles Hart’s libretto ranges from adolescent snickering ­regarding matters sexual to political ­knockabout. The scene in which Marx ­trounces the imagined Italian anarchist Giuseppe ­Melanzane in debate is a particular joy.

READ MORE: Wet Wet Wet star on why Templeton Carpet Factory is 'best' building in Scotland

Dove’s music carries the influence of ­American minimalism, particularly, in the ­opera’s most dramatic moments, the ­repetitions and ­variations of Philip Glass. The superb ­baritone ­Roland Wood is a tremendous Marx, combining warm, sonorous singing with ­wonderfully agile and exasperated performance.

Elsewhere in the universally excellent cast, Rebecca Bottone gives a gutsy and ­clever ­performance, as befits the character of Marx’s loyal and intelligent daughter Eleanor. It is ­apposite, too, that Dove has conceived a ­memorable scene in which the chorus – ­representing, in Marxist terms, the diversity and ­potential power of the modern working class – paraphrases one of Marx’s most famous ­passages imagining a future socialist society.

ON ANOTHER NOTE...

Futurism of an altogether bleaker variety is the subject of Ragnarok, the latest show by ­Edinburgh-based puppet theatre company ­Tortoise In A Nutshell (Tin).

Although it creates a frightening, near-future dystopia, the piece (which was a highlight of the recent Manipulate festival in Edinburgh) draws upon the ancient Norse myth of the end of days.

Combining ingeniously constructed sets and puppets with a live and recorded soundtrack, and live film technology, the theatre-makers of Tin evoke a stricken cityscape in which the wretched population is the subject of ­famine and social breakdown. We are, in the third ­decade of the 21st century, not short of visions of catastrophe, both immediate and imminent.

However, when Tin embarked on this work, they could hardly have known that the state of Israel would create in Gaza a hell on Earth that would rival even their darkest imaginings. Nor could they have foreseen the warning by a group of eminent scientists earlier this month that the weather system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) could collapse so suddenly that remedial action would be impossible.

All of which just goes to prove that artists – from creators of theatre and film to novelists and painters – are on to a safe bet if they choose impending apocalypse as their subject. Indeed, Ragnarok – in which a girl and her young brother embark on a journey of salvation – is powerfully reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road (which was adapted brilliantly for the big screen by John Hillcoat in 2009).

However, if the subject matter is familiar, the form of Tin’s work is not. The artists project live film via miniature cameras onto a circle above the performance space that functions both as a dead sun and a cinema screen.

By means of clever, intricate video work, we are taken inside urban dwellings that are ­denuded of both food and hope. Intelligently, the central set comes apart just as the social ­fabric breaks into pieces.

The children’s journey – including, ­poignantly, what the great chronicler of the Holocaust Primo Levi called “moments of reprieve” – is generated by the perfect combination of the piece’s numerous elements from spoken dialogue to live mixing of the soundscape, and live filming of puppets, toy soldiers and various constructed sets. The technical work – including the movement of the young theatre-makers across the performance space – is carried out in front of us.

We could, if we so choose, turn our attention to the technical aspect of the performance at the expense of the narrative. It is testimony to the work’s astonishing marriage of form and content, however, that one is so captivated by the fruit of Tin’s labours that their immense technical accomplishments become almost an afterthought.

Ragnarok is, surely, one of the most ­original, technically accomplished and brilliantly ­realised pieces of theatre to be created for the Scottish stage in recent times.

Marx In London! plays Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, February 22 and 24: scottishopera.org.uk

Ragnarok is touring until March 28: tortoiseinanutshell.com