Mary Gabriel’s book about Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and their families, titled Love and Capital, will be adapted as a limited TV series as a collective effort by Germany’s X-Filme, France’s Haut et Court, the U.K.’s Potboiler, and James Schamus’ Symbolic Exchange.
Alice Birch, playwright and screenwriter who most recently penned Lady Macbeth, will write the script. Birch, whose plays include Ophelia’s Zimmer for the Royal Court and Schaubüne, and We Want You to Watch for the National Theatre, was the co-winner of the 2014 George Devine Award for Revolt. She said. Revolt Again, winner of the Arts Foundation Award for Playwriting 2014, and was one of the BBC Writersroom 10 for 2014.
The story follows Jenny and Karl Marx and their daughters, Friedrich Engels and the two sisters, Mary and Lizzie Burns, whom he loved and who loved him, Variety reports.
“Illicit affairs, revolutionary plots, murder-suicide pacts, midnight escapes, aristocratic luxury and Dickensian poverty — the true story of the Marx dynasty outdoes even the most fanciful of today’s invented soap operas, all against the background of a world on fire and the formation of ideas that still transform today’s global society,” a statement revealed.
“This is event television, and a perfect topic for large-scale European co-production with partners of tremendous distinction and taste,” Shamus said. “To have a bold visionary like Alice Birch leading the initial creative charge makes this all the more exciting.”
Schamus, a former CEO of Focus Features put together the New York City-based Symbolic Exchange in 2015, won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival for The Ice Storm, and was producer of the Oscar-nominated Brokeback Mountain. Symbolic Exchange has a deal with Meridian Entertainment, and has announced that its first two features to be financed under that deal are Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, and Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s A Prayer Before Dawn, to premiere next year.