Did you read about the German theatre group who are staging Marx's Das Kapital? Not, you'll be relieved to hear, as a musical. Nor even as a straight play. What they're actually doing, at the Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus, is invite people who have read Marx from cover to cover to recount their own experiences. It sounds dotty but in fact it's not a bad way of inviting us to dip into the great unread: apparently you even get Volume 23 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels as a going-away present.
A great deal of theatre, of course, is already based on existing literature. Next week the National Theatre offers us new versions of Thérèse Raquin and The Waves. But why must it always be fiction? Isn't there scope for staging fact? One of the great experiences of my theatregoing lifetime was hearing Alec McCowen not merely reading St Mark's Gospel but turning it into a highly dramatic event. Which suggests to me infinite possibilities for taking a leaf out of Dusseldorf's book and putting on stage works that have pervaded western culture but remain largely unread.
You could even combine theatrical tension with instruction. Why not juxtapose a reading of Genesis with key extracts from Darwin's On The Origin of Species followed by a debate among rival believers? It would certainly make the fur fly and be a lot more interesting than Spamalot. I was thinking you might also have readings from Mein Kampf but that would probably attract the wrong crowd. You could, however, have a fascinating discussion on the power of the Will, starting with Schopenhauer, leading on to Nietzsche and climaxing in Shaw's preface to Man and Superman.
You think I'm kidding. But actually I'm not. Theatre is changing all the time and one thing people have woken up to in recent years is the power of documentary theatre. Nicolas Kent at the Tricycle Theatre in north London has found there is a huge hunger for what is now called "verbatim theatre" in which you offer edited versions of public inquiries: topics have ranged from the Stephen Lawrence case to Bloody Sunday in Derry. And only two weeks ago I went to an extraordinary evening at the Tricycle where six short plays about Darfur were followed by a serious debate about what could practically be done. I came away not just better informed, I felt I had encountered the kind of ideological confrontation you certainly don't get in the Commons or on TV current affairs programmes.
Which brings us back to the idea of staging Das Kapital. You may ask "why?". I say "why not?". Western communism may have collapsed but Marx is a hugely important historical figure whom even Isaiah Berlin once compared to "an ancient prophet performing a task imposed on him by heaven." I can see that a show about Das Kapital may not exactly bring in the crowds but what the hell. Man cannot live by musicals alone.
