CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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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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FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
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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