China to Bring Das Kapital to Life on Beijing Stage

You've read the book, attended the seminars and pondered the accumulation of surplus value – now see the musical.

Chinese producers are attempting to transform Das Kapital from a hefty treatise on political economy into a popular stage show, complete with catchy tunes and nifty footwork.

Whether Karl Marx would approve of his masterwork being served up as entertainment for China's new bourgeoisie is a matter of speculation. But the director He Nian – best known for his stage adaptation of a martial-arts spoof – has promised to unite elements from Broadway musicals and Las Vegas shows in a hip, interesting and educational play featuring a live band, singing and dancing.

"The particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marx's theories cannot be distorted," he said sternly, in an interview with the Wen Hui Bao newspaper.

Zhang Jun, an economics professor at Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University, is being drafted in to ensure the production is intellectually rigorous.

The director said the play, which is to open next year, will be set in a company and will document the progress of its workers. In the first half they realize their boss is exploiting them and begin to understand the theory of surplus value. But far from uniting, as Marx enjoined them in the Communist Manifesto, some continue to work as before, some mutiny and others employ collective bargaining.

Yang Shaolin, the general manager of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, said that in the past it would have been difficult to imagine Das Kapital adapted into a play with "main characters, major dramatic elements, and profound educational meaning", but that it was now possible thanks to the flourishing of different styles in Chinese theatre.

Even so, the producers face a tough challenge. True, the social criticism of Marx's 19th century contemporaries Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo has been transmuted into two hugely successful all-singing, all-dancing musicals – Oliver! and Les Miserables. But unlike the novels on which those were based, Das Kapital has never been noted for its vivid characterization or gripping plot.

There is some precedent for the new production. A Japanese writer and translator is said to have adapted Das Kapital for the stage in the 1930s, and the result was subsequently translated into Chinese.

Three years ago a German theatre group had another bash. But despite an added inducement to attend – a copy of Volume 23 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels for each theatre-goer – the Suddeutsche Zeitung described it as mostly "something of a lecture … at times dry and boring".