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The groundbreaking one-woman show relays Marx’s Soho residency with verve as well as loving care
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JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
Marx in Soho,
Riddles Court, Edinburgh
★★★★★
HOWARD ZINN’S 1999 play is not just a provocative resurrection of Karl Marx for modern times — it has created a highway for multiple Karl Marxes to appear — as a bearded impersonator and an afro’d black worker in US productions — and this incarnation comes with a brilliant twist: Marx comes back as a woman.
Mary Myers performs Marx with no make-up and no beard, just a suit and the shuffle of an elderly intellectual, but she summons the presence of the man with compelling virtuosity.
You just watch her eyebrows, and every other detail fills itself in. And this new spin takes the play on an exhilarating ride, and adds an extra layer of subversiveness.
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