Thursday, November 09, 2006

The smell of the proletariat, the roar of the mob

Collective puts Marx's Das Kapital on stage
There is no wedding, no romantic interest and no plot to speak of. Instead the reader of Karl Marx's epic work, Das Kapital, is treated to a lengthy treatise on the division of labour and capitalist modes of production, offered up in long, convoluted sentences.
Yet none of this has deterred a German theatre group from achieving the seemingly impossible: bringing the huge classic on economic theory to the stage.
Not since Proust was serialised has a dramatist faced such a gargantuan task - turning catchy topics such as 'the production of absolute surplus value' into a crowd puller.


The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported that it is dry and boring. What a surprise! They should have made it a musical with scantily dressed dancers kicking up a storm to The Internationale. They could call it A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Revolution. The bookish yet hunky young Karl would yearn for love as he soulfully croons I May Be Red But I'm Not Dead. In the end he would get the girl and stick it to the man. I'd pay to see that.

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