A bloke was working the queue outside the Theatre Royal, selling a newspaper called the Communist. ‘Marxist ideas, alive today!’ he shouted into the Glasgow drizzle. Was he part of the show; a Graham Vick-style touch of Total Theatre? In any case, he didn’t seem to be shifting many units. He might have been even more disappointed by the opera itself: Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, here receiving its first UK production, is a new opera buffa with Karl Marx as the protagonist of a gleefully silly period comedy.

Readers know left-wing economics is absurd, but there’s a frisson in seeing it portrayed as outright farce

Spectator readers already know that left-wing economic theory is intrinsically absurd, but there’s a wicked little frisson in seeing it portrayed as outright farce. The Marx family are at home in Belsize Park on the day their furniture is repossessed: the great economist can’t manage his own household budget. Spies buzz around and Marx’s headstrong daughter Tussi (Rebecca Bottone) sets her cap at one of them. Meanwhile Marx (Roland Wood, an absolute ringer in frockcoat and beard) gropes the housekeeper, pawns his wife’s silver and can’t sit down to finish Das Kapital because he’s a martyr to piles.

If that sounds a bit broad, well, yes, and all the better for it. The libretto is by Charles Hart (the Aspects of Love guy), from a scenario by Jürgen R Weber. Yannis Thavoris’s cheerful designs suggest storybook illustrations, and director Stephen Barlow makes hay with Hart’s goofy rhymes and improbable coincidences. Old-school comic stereotypes abound, including the battleaxe housewife Jenny (Orla Boylan, who arrives with smoke billowing from under her skirts) and the goatish, tricycle-riding Engels (Alasdair Elliott). There’s even a comedy foreigner, the Italian Melanzane (Paul Hopwood, in purple with a green cap – run it through Google Translate) who locks oratorical horns with Marx in a direct homage to Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

Sondheim came to mind a lot, as did John Adams (Nixon in China, flashing up in brassy neon). Still, if you’re going to reference anyone in modern opera, why not go to the best? Marx in London! has a pacey, exuberant score and under David Parry the orchestra fizzed – from the obligato typewriter in the opening scene to Marx’s big debate with Melanzane, where the Italian’s bluster is accompanied by a flatulent trombone. Then Marx responds and the music begins to soar, though the material comprises the same empty scales and arpeggios. Bad ideas are still bad ideas, but a master can spin them – temporarily – into the illusion of gold. Clever chap, that Dove.

Anyway, it went down a storm. Bottone was a livewire as Tussi, Lucy Schaufer was sympathetic as the housekeeper Helene and William Morgan’s light tenor was just the job for Tussi’s moon-faced sweetheart Freddy. At the heart of it all was Woods as Marx, alternately proud and flustered as his ideals collide with reality. As with any good comedy there’s something deeper here – a pathos in Marx’s hapless attempts to build a better world. We know that his ideas will bring death to millions; he doesn’t, and Dove and Hart’s touching epilogue transforms him from socialist saint into a surprisingly relatable Everyman. It’s no small thing to create an opera that entertains for a whole evening, peopled by engaging and believable human characters, but Dove is a hugely experienced opera composer (he’s done 18 at the last count). Perhaps the question isn’t why he makes it sound so easy, but why so many living composers seem to find it so hard.

Opera North has revived Karolina Sofulak’s drab production of Cavalleria rusticana, conducted with warmth by Antony Hermus and passionately sung by a cast that appears in its entirety in the second half of this double bill: a new production (also by Sofulak) of Rachmaninoff’s first opera, Aleko. It’s almost unknown in the UK, and it’s unlikely that even the most broad-minded Slavophile will have anticipated a staging that relocates Pushkin’s gypsy melodrama to the world of The Big Lebowski. Rachmaninoff’s brooding melancholy and bittersweet melodies (so much spicier than his later stuff) unfurl over a remarkably marijuana-free surf commune, in which Aleko (Robert Hayward) is an interloper from squaresville and his lover Zemfira (Elin Pritchard) is a free-spirited photographer.

All that tie-dyed cheesecloth certainly looks colourful, and Hayward and Pritchard both hurl themselves at their roles; channelling anguish into rich, ardent singing (the Opera North chorus generates some wonderful black-toned low notes, too). Andres Presno, the doomed lover in both operas, has a ringing, gutsy tenor. But Sofulak’s direction is curiously static and Zemfira’s death is so bizarrely staged that the audience simply laughed. Hermus, too, left big tension-sapping pauses between the individual numbers. Sure, some of Aleko’s flaws are due to Rachmaninoff, who was only 19 when he completed the opera – but isn’t it down to the director and conductor to try and fix them?