Jeremy Corbyn’s virtual appearance as the Wizard of Ozlington in a Christmas panto in his Islington Constituency is not his first acting appearance.
He participated in a balloon debate with the late historian Dorothy Thompson at a Marylebone School. Thompson played Queen Victoria while Corbyn played Karl Marx.
Jacobin (7th Feb 2024) carried the following account
Dorothy Thompson [socialist historian and campaigner, author of The Dignity of Chartism among other works, and Edward’s wife] I also knew quite well. Dorothy and I had a very interesting relationship; we used to go to a secondary school in Marleybone, Quintin Kynaston School, which had an annual “balloon debate” where you had to go into “the balloon” playing a particular character, and then would vote on who would be “thrown out” and who would “survive” to the end.
I was there being Karl Marx, and Dorothy was there playing Queen Victoria. She was absolutely brilliant at being Queen Victoria and managed to create a sort of almost feminist narrative around Queen Victoria’s life. At one point we got into a sort of repartee, and she was saying: “Mr Marx, you don’t even want my head to be on my shoulders,” and I was just saying: “Your Majesty — no, I’m not calling you ‘Your Majesty,’ you’re just a person; you’re Mrs Saxe-Coburg-Gotha!” It became a big joke, the whole thing, and we got on really well. She was actually brilliant at bringing out Queen Victoria in the role of the monarch during all the social movements of the nineteenth century; she would say things like: “I suppose, Mr Marx, you support the Chartists?
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