Dove Marx in London! Scottish Opera, February 2024 Director Stephen Barlow Choreographer Kally Loyd-Jones Video PJ McEvoy Lighting Rory Beaton

Reviews 

This capacious Dove-Hart miscellany is embraced fully in Stephen Barlow’s stylish production, designed with magical ingenuity by Yannis Thavoris. Bustles, silks and penny farthing fix the action in the 1870s. Using the techniques of toy theatre, backdrops are taken from maps and prints of Victorian Bloomsbury, the British Museum reading room, London seen from Hampstead. **** (The Observer)

…Cogent and witty. Packed full of vivid stage pictures… The kinetic designs, by Yannis Thavoris, with video by PJ McEvoy, recreate (the British Museum) as well as the Marx family home and a picaresque travelogue though Victorian London. **** (The Guardian)

Barlow's fluid production benefits from Yannis Thavoris's lovely Victorian designs and some terrific scenic video projections by PJ McEvoy. **** (The Times)

Yannis Thavoris’ quirky set designs of delightful pop-up-book period drawings of London buildings, ingeniously animated in map form with superb video magic from PJ McEvoy, provide a kinetic backdrop. … Thavoris and the costume team had fun with the 1870s as hooped skirts were all the rage and crinoline was just emerging as a fabric. The workers were studiously flat-cap drab, but the Marx family were handsomely dressed with Marx himself resplendent in frock coat and red trousers, ladies in sumptuous dresses down to Jenny’s voluminous shocking pink number. …a big bold show from Scottish Opera, enormously entertaining all round. **** (Backtrack)

Stephen Barlow’s imaginative direction unfurled yet more layers of mischief and a giddy array of references from the Marx Brothers to Oscar Wilde and Sherlock Holmes. Designer Yannis Thavoris’s and video designer PJ McEvoy weaved their own jokes into the quirky sets and backdrops reminiscent of the cutout tableaux in Wes Anderson’s movies. …Steal a ticket if you have to. ***** (Opera Now)

Yannis Thavoris’ designs are very effective – from floating furniture getting taken away by bailiffs to hidden rooms behind picture frames; there’s a sort of cartoonish quality to the world created here. ***** (West End Best Friend)

Scottish Opera’s magnificent Marx in London! demonstrates a creative synergy that’s all-consuming. It can’t have been hard for Barlow to contribute such perfectly matched stagecraft, nor designer Yannis Thavoris his punchy sets. The creative synergy is all-consuming. ***** (The Scotsman)

The visually overt homage to Terry Gilliam’s collage animation permeated Yannis Thavoris’ design, Kally Lloyd-Jones’ movement direction, PJ McEvoy’s ingenious video back-projection and Rory Beaton’s lighting. … stunningly costumed… A triumphant confluence of excellence in music, acting, stagecraft, design and direction… (Edinburgh Music Review) 

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. (The National)

Housing us through plenty of rich humour is Yannis Thavoris’s stellar design work that collides old-etchings of London with a helping of pop art by way of a Monty Python opening. And as the furniture flies higher than high, with scene changes into enormous museum reading rooms and dark avaricious pawn-dens, it all ties together the animated nature of performance… **** (Corr Blimey)

The Terry Gilliam-esque stage was set beautifully, with rooms within rooms, moving street scenes, furniture which was up, down, and flying around …and so much more. The inventiveness and creativity on show was awesome, and mention must be made of the lighting design of Rory Beaton, the stunning video design of PJ McEvoy, and the overall design of Yannis Thavoris. I won't go into further detail here as I don't want to spoil anything for you, but you are in for such a visual, as well as aural, treat. 

This was as entertaining as a night at the theatre gets - warm, witty, and often wild, but still managing to make you think as you laugh and applaud. Simply capital! (Scots Whay Hae)

The drama is carried forward through lots of short scenes requiring extremely quick changes. This all worked wonderfully thanks to the inspired designs of Yannis Thavoris, with video elements by PJ McEvoy - wonderful ever-changing London streetscapes. The Marx drawing room starts fully furnished but becomes more spartan after the visit of the broker's men. All is restored at the end thanks to the Deus-ex-machina Engels, who arrives on a penny-farthing, with appropriate angels' wings sprouting from his shoulders. (Opera Scotland) 

Extraordinarily entertaining. What a fantastical treat! The UK premiere of this work (…) was, I hope, only the first of many opportunities to see this extraordinary piece. … The setting is a marvel.Things fly up and down [goodness me the nerve required to hoist up, suspend, and eventually lower down all the furniture including the piano!] Blackout screens drop into a false proscenium arch to facilitate transformations into a pawn shop and other settings, including a superb section of the British Museum’s Reading Room, complete with irate readers who don’t appreciate Marx’s howls as his attempts to sit down are rendered agonising by his carbuncles.Projected backdrops enable the cast to move along the streets of London and even up into the air as the runaway piano takes to the skies… (Scots Gay Arts)

Designer Yannis Thavoris leaves nothing to the imagination in a formidable set that flits between an aristocratic living room, a pawnbroker’s shop, a rambunctious pub and Hampstead Heath. The addition of floating furniture and a seemingly airborne removals van adds to the chaotic brilliance of the performance. **** (The Student)

(Marx’s house) is here wittily recreated by designer Yannis Thavoris as a pocket music-hall with footlights, full of clever effects such as floating furniture, for this inaugural UK staging of Jonathan Dove's opera Marx in London! (The Telegraph)

Charles Hart’s libretto is bullet-like, Barlow’s direction is ceaselessly inventive, Yannis Thavoris’ playful designs bear an animated picture book charm, Kally Lloyd-Jones’ choreography bristles with irony – all embracing Dove’s music, which is vigorously minimalist in essence. It’s a show that knows exactly how to celebrate slapstick, satire and farce without veering towards the ridiculous. (Vox Carnyx)

Yannis Thavoris’s cheerful designs suggest storybook illustrations, and director Stephen Barlow makes hay with Hart’s goofy rhymes and improbable coincidences. (Spectator)

When Designer Yannis Thavoris’s excellent set permits the cart to lift off, one can almost hear the woosh of a bed flying past to strains of ‘The Age of Not Believing’.

Such excellent and innovative staging holds true throughout, with backdrop projections of a sketched period London creating a stylish and stylised world. Physical walls and props conjuring locations from Marx’s home to a pawnshop, or the British Library are moved in and out of position with practised efficiency. (The Quintessential Review)

Ingenious use of set design and decoration is prevalent throughout – with frequent usage of split level stages and manoeuvrability of every element of set furniture. In the first instance, Karl Marx is shown in his writing room, separated from the uproar, whilst the bailiffs attach various furniture items to ropes in the living room, from which the items are suspended in mid air. This device is used to great effect throughout the performance, and the use of multiple eye levels and increasingly frantic movement on stage mimics the inner turmoil shown by the characters. The use of a video backdrop worked perfectly, and appeared deceptively effortless… **** (A Youngish Perspective)

It’s a visually rich production – the arsenic-green wallpaper is bedecked with paintings, the ladies’ dresses are fabulous. (The Opera Critic)