In the late 1840s, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, and Heinrich Heine were all, apparently, chums; young men in the prime of their lives, Germans living in Paris, supporting each other's work and helping each other out. From this convenient collision of revolutionary artists and artistic revolutionaries, Jonathan Leaf spins his play The Germans in Paris into a thought-provoking piece of theatre.
We first meet Marx and Heine as Marx is about to be arrested for publishing a radical magazine. Some of his papers have been stolen, and he fears there is an informer in their group of radicals. The rest of the play is mostly concerned with Heine's attempt to pull strings with his mistress's sister's husband to get Marx released. While trying to save Marx from deportation, he begins to question the man's socialist theories and his own dedication to them. Meanwhile, a callow and brash Wagner is trying to get people to acknowledge his genius and get his operas produced in Paris, meeting bemused resistance all the way.The play is full of peppy bon mots, which brought hearty chuckles from the audience. Most of these come from Heine, who, while terribly witty (as is appropriate for a writer), at times seems just a hair too glib to be the emotional focus of the play, especially when dealing with the weightier issues in Act II.Videos