Solidarity Books presents...Howard Zinn's 'Marx in Soho' and Wallace Shawn's 'The Fever'

Solidarity Books presents…Howard Zinn’s ‘Marx in Soho’ and Wallace Shawn’s ‘The Fever’

Sunday, July 29th, 3pm – Marx in Soho
Tuesday, July 31st, 8pm – The Fever
Wednesday, Aug. 1st, 8pm – Marx in Soho

@ The Workshop Theatre, Sample Studios (old FAS building), Sullivan’s Quay
Tickets €8/€5 waged/low-waged or unwaged.

The last time actor and activist Jerry Levy graced these shores he had sell out shows across the country. He returns to perform Howard Zinn’s “Marx in Soho” as well as Wallace Shawn’s “The Fever”. 

Together these plays illustrate the humanity, care and frailty that lie at the heart of struggles in solidarity for justice and equality. His one person performance are simply brilliant as Jerry brings to life the nuances and contradictions in both Zinn and Shawn complimentary pieces.

Come see them yourself and you’ll be talking for ages. And often the case Jerry himself is happy to rejoin the audience to break the barriers between performers and consumers. 

Jerry Levy
While not teaching or touring or writing, Jerry Levy is involved in other productions as both Actor and Director. He also has taught sociology at Marlboro College since 1975.  In conjunction with his performances Jerry Levy gives lectures, leads discussions and conducts workshops relating the themes of the plays to current events, education, art, culture and society.

Marx in Soho (Howard Zinn)

Howard Zinn’s “Marx in Soho” portrays the return of Marx. Embedded in some secular afterlife where intellectuals, artists, and radicals are sent, Marx is given permission by the administrative committee to return to Soho, London, to have his say. But through a bureaucratic mix–up, he winds up in SOHO in New York. From there the audience is given a rare glimpse of a Marx seldom talked about; Marx the man. The play offers an entertaining and thorough introduction to a person who knows little about Marx’s life, while also offering valuable insight to students of his ideas.
Marx alone occupies the stage. “Marx has different voices. The actor has to show Marx’s outrage at social injustice, express the pedantic Marx, the vindictive Marx, Marx, the loving family man, Marx as humorist, and a Marx that can laugh at his enemies”

The Fever (Wallace Shawn)

While traveling in a poor country, a sensitive, well educated, arts loving and consumption-driven man or woman of any age discovers that his/her life-affirming existence is related to the often brutal suffering of others. In the bathroom of a hotel our “anti-hero” feverishly defends and relentlessly attacks his own way of life. Inner voices and imagined characters fuel his fever as he narrates and often attempts to enact his story.

Mat Kavanagh, Liverpool-Irish anarchist (1876-1954) anarchist (1876-1954)

This obituary was published in the British anarchist paper, Freedom, in 1954.

Mat Kavanagh was a Liverpool-Irish anarchist who, in a lifetime of political activity, worked alongside such well known revolutionaries as Peter Kropotkin, Rufolf Rocker andEricco Malatesta.

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Born in Limerick in 1876, he moved to Liverpool and became involved in the anarchist movement in his teenage years. A good public speaker, he often spoke at the Sunday morning anarchist meetings at the Monument in Liverpool’s city centre.

In 1912 he was chosen to be one of the speakers at the mass rally in Trafalgar Square against the threatened deportation of the celebrated Italian anarchist Malatesta.

Like the vast majority of anarchists, he took a strong anti-militarist stand during World War One. One of the great sadnesses of his life was to occur at this time. His only son was conscripted and died in the fighting.

John Hewetson in his obituary says that “in 1916 Mat went back to Dublin to take part in the activity initiated by Connolly and Larkin”. However, we have found no confirmation of this. The accuracy of Hewetson’s account is questionable as Jim Larkin was in America at that time and was not involved in the preparations for the rising.

As the Spanish civil war brought new interest in anarchism, Kavanagh spoke at the first open-air meeting of the newly-invigorated anarchist movement in Paddington in 1936, an attempt to start a series of mass meetings. It came under attack from the fascists who were successfully driven off.

The following year Kavanagh met up with Jack White of Irish Citizen Army and Republican Congress fame, who had moved to anarchism as a result of his first hand experiences whilst fighting Franco’s fascists. They worked together on a survey of Irish labour but this was lost when White died in 1940 and his papers disappeared. According to Leo Keohane, who researched White’s politics for a doctoral thesis, their intention was to “produce an anarchist’s perspective on Connolly’s ‘Labour in Irish History’”.

As Hewetson noted: “Just how far back his personal memories went was illustrated by his anecdotes about old Edward Craig whom Mat knew at the end of his life, and who, in his early manhood had been the inspirer of the Owenite Commune at Ralahine in the years 1830-33”.

James Connolly wrote about this in his Labour in Irish History.  Ralahine is close to Newmarket-on-Fergus in Co. Clare.

In a short biography of Kavanagh at libcom.org, Nick Heath adds:

“During the Second World War Mat moved to Southend. Now in his sixties, he was interned under Regulation 18b with other members of the local anarchist group, the Independent Labour Party and pacifists, when Southend was declared a ‘danger area’ by the authorities.

“Mat organised these together and demanded to see the Commandant of the internment camp. He requested that the anarchists, socialists and Jews interned there be separated from the Mosley fascists who had also been rounded up. Eventually the authorities backed down and released Mat and co, realising that the so-called anti-fascist war they were pursuing would be questioned if obvious anti-fascists were being imprisoned alongside fascists.

“Mat contributed to the pages of Solidarity, the paper of the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation, which appeared from 1938 and continued throughout the Second World War.

“Mat had to move up to London where he found work as a barber. He had worked most of his life on the building sites and advancing age had meant his seeking of alternative employment.  Albert Meltzer, in his autobiography ‘I couldn’t paint golden angels’, tells us that he was not a very good barber, but had the honour of shaving George Orwell, who wrote him up in an article calling him a “an old Irish IRA (!) Anarchist hairdresser” who “used to cut my hair in Fleet Street”.

source http://irishanarchisthistory.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/mat-kavanagh-liverpool-irish-anarchist-1876-1954/