Australian actor and writer, currently based in New York, Clara Francesca fights against female stereotypes, historical airbrushing and patriarchal biographers with her one woman show “Making Marx”. Having wowed audiences at 2024’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Francesca will be bringing back her subversive show to London in the new year.
We sat down with Clara Francesca to discuss what it takes to make “Making Marx”.
“Making Marx” is an “absurdist extravaganza about Karl Marx’s wife Jenny being silenced and using that as an allegory for anyone who has been silenced across time.”
Francesca wants to set the record straight on the divisive figure of Jenny von Westphalen. Having married Karl Marx in 1843, she has since been entwined with the infamy of Marx as a polarising man in politics and world history.
Having played Jenny Marx in a cameo role in a play previously, Francesca could not shake the story of this woman from her mind.
“She was always described as this beautiful but stupid woman who married Karl Marx. It didn’t track to me. Why is this woman being slandered by biographers who never met her? What’s the value of degrading her in such a way?”
“She funded Karl’s existence. She came from a wealthy family, so the dowry that was given to them in their marriage allowed him to work and travel. But describing her as stupid made me really angry at these biographies.”
But the process of developing the play did not pan out how she expected. Originally intending for it to be her own biographical interpretation of Jenny’s life, it began to stray away from a chronological fashion.
“It’s an esoteric, Ionesco meets Pirandello meets Brecht kind of show. I started by writing it linearly, but as I was writing it that way I thought it can’t be that. The whole point of this piece is that we don’t fully know who another person is. The play itself morphed into a non-traumatic version of representing psychosis and the multiplicity of someone’s complex identity. ”
This multiplicity is Francesca’s way of encompassing the breadth of the real Jenny’s character.
“She was very gregarious and she was a charmer. Part of their work was hosting parties, pontificating and sharing ideas. The reports seem to suggest she was a bit of a flirt and would use charisma, as many of us do in the art world, to hold space. There’s a beauty to that. We shame women who are too charismatic – I experience it today – and if I’m too charming my intelligence will be perceived as something wicked and dangerous. He had an affair, which broke her spirits. She is believed to have never had an affair, but was vilified for being too flirtatious.”
Clara Francesca hopes to “take the audience on a journey of how someone might lose their voice and how they might empower themselves to find it again.”
Follow Clara Francesca at the following for updates on “Making Marx”.
Website: www.clarafrancesca.com
Instagram: @clar_esca