The Marx Family Saga

What if Marx was one of us?

He's writing the new Faust. He's barely scraping by. He's looking for an apartment after he and his family were evicted from Dean Street. He discusses with comrades, with the forefather Abraham, as well as with animated images of builders. He indulges in hydrotherapy. He reflects in the windows of porn stores, sweeps Moscow nightclubs, winks at us from pictures. He is sitting with Jenny in Hampstead watching a live broadcast of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. He's switching to Dallas. Or another endless series from a new world subject to the laws of the market. He escapes us. Founder of scientific socialism. Philosopher and poet. Prophet and deceiver. Loving father. Sad clown. Devil! Karl Marx. He has influenced our present more fundamentally than any other intellectual of modern times, it is said. He strove for justice and solidarity - and yet we know him above all as the inspirer of cruel dictatorships. What do we really know about him? And why should we still want to know anything about him?

In his ingeniously composed work, the prominent Spanish author Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017) unleashes a crazy game of filters through which we perceive Marx's elusive and contradictory personality. He takes us on a rollercoaster through space and time, shaking up the image we have made not only of Marx, but of our relationship to the "generation of dead ancestors" in general. And with his gaze fixed on persistent poverty, widening social divides, accelerating planetary devastation, the migration crisis, xenophobia and racism, he asks whether the step forward we celebrated with the fall of communism could not, in a certain sense, also be a leap backwards.

Please note that the production uses stroboscopic effects, artificial smoke and actors smoking cigarettes on stage to highlight the director's intention.

For performances with subtitles, we recommend using the seats in the last three rows.

Jan Mikulášek (1978) is the regular director of the Na Zábradlí Theater in Prague. His stage adaptation of Bernhard's Woodcutters became the Production of the Year 2018 in the Theater Newspaper Awards. This creator of an impressive artistic gesture working with cut, musical counterpoint and parallel unfolding stories returns to the Husa na provázku theatre after the extremely successful productions of Don Quixote and Dictionary of the Khazars.