Brighton Fringe 2023

Des Kapital

Andy Thomas

Genre: Adaptation, Cabaret, Character Stand up, Contemporary, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Live Music, New Writing, Theatre

Venue: SweetVenues, The Poets Ale and Smoke House, 33 Montgomery Street, Hove

Festival: Brighton Fringe

Low Down

Review

Marx cabaret. The Marx Side of the Room – because every year is 1917, because every year is October. But not Goldener Oktober (or the Hunt for Red, and so on), even if there’s a few golden Marx jokes that didn’t make it into Das, only Des Kapital. Andy Thomas’ Des Kapital arrives at SweetVenues, The Poets Ale and Smoke House for a strictly limited coup.

This is an extraordinary evening. It’s a non-linear history-lesson, and not at all like say Mark Steel’s traversals. Soviet-hatted and red-corseted Andy Thomas despite taking a poll of audience communists (not quite enough for a revolution) plays his own socialisms close to his bemedalled chest though when the queen’s funeral (“I didn’t go” he asserts) is brought on, by now we’ve a pretty good idea.

Thomas though leading the audience in a series of beautifully-fitted-up and absurdly imposed parody-songs, sashays between communist atrocities and capitalist nightmares. He begins in fact with Harold complaining he can’t get enough Anglo-Saxons, to the tune of a disgruntled-looking Jagger. In other words Thomas places British woes at the foot of feudal, brought over in 1066. The rhymes would be outrageous if they weren’t edgily true.

So Thomas starts with an impressively well-devised and well-delivered set of videos slides, dissolves from senior servants and women living around the south coast (surely this must alter for each venue) all of whom cite Gary Powers, the pilot in the U2 shot down on May 1st (of all days) 1960, over Soviet territory and later spy-swapped (and his wife at home was doing as much as possible to keep swapping alive).

Thomas’ pilot does eventually make an appearance to ‘Gary Can Wait’ as oasis is just one of many bands, one of many songs, appropriated for sing-along comrades, as everyone’d directed to the cues on screen.

So one of the first things we’re treated to is Chinese mass starvation in Mao’s 1958 Great Leap Forward. We’re also given a litany of NKVD (precursor of the KGB) heads, culminating in Beria. Some rhymes fitted to the gallimaufry of songs are sublime, some are deliberately so rough you could cut whole prosodic – or, in the NKVD torture-rooms, real feet – on them.

But then there’s a gentle homage to the Stasi later on, after that little matter of the Berlin Wall. The only song we never get was the Beatles Back in the USSR. Though the Smiths more than make up for it.

Zig-zagging Soviet evils (and pratfalls, look at Andropov on a swing) with capitalist greed is a good way into anesthetising what’s wrong with the left, before sneakily suggesting there might be a better way than capitalism. This audience is wholly in Thomas’s palm, as he leads off each song interspersed with letters always somehow mentioning Gary Powers.

The video presentation and lighting by the oft-cited (by Thomas) Gabriel Magill is beautifully on-point, and this cabaret’s not only a tight ship. Unlike the submarines cited (always one of the odder decisions here) it won’t sink under the weight of its metaphor.

The end, where Marx, curiously absent previously, emerges to surpass Lenin, is oddly touching. ‘I Believe in Engels’ is a smart riposte to the more doctrinaire approach to Marxism, with some blissful sidesteps. Engels directed Marx, edited and corrected him “right or wrong” as the whacky lyrics say.

Revolutionary songs sung by a lusty audience in the heart of Hove. A revolution in itself. If you’ve any sympathy, antipathy or subversive sense of humour towards a way at laughing at history’s atrocities, and thinking there must be a better way – this is the show for you.

Published June 4, 2023June 4, 2023 by Simon Jenner