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Early autumn London theatre has already featured two Oscar winners: Cate Blanchett in Electra / Persona and Mark Rylance in Tartuffe (Remixed). Now Tilda Swinton makes a trio. This shows the commendable dedication of some screen talent to theatre but also the box office need, in recessions, for famous faces. Unusually, there was a first night red carpet outside the Royal Court, leading a writer long associated with the venue to express “shock” to ushers at such Hollywood vulgarity.
Swinton is reprising Manfred Karge’s Man to Man, which she first performed 39 years ago, in a production heading to Edinburgh, Berlin and New York. The piece is a multicharacter monologue starting in Germany in the 1930s.
When her husband, Max, dies, Ella Gericke puts on his clothes and takes over his job as a crane operator. She seems to act from some combination of bereavement denial, cross-gender curiosity and proto-feminist belief in equal employment.
Ella’s challenge as Max is to be a bloke unremarkable enough not to alert men or arouse women. The next worst thing that could happen is Germany calling up men to war with the resulting medicals and barrack rooms.
In the most chilling moment, the workmates’ certainty of her masculinity becomes dangerous when the lads attempt debagging to seek evidence of circumcision that might then have led to death.
With high hair and white body paint that may suggest disguise or scabies, Swinton strikingly resembles David Bowie’s avatar Aladdin Sane, an earlier project exploring androgyny. With a gruff laddishness as her base tone, Swinton – on a Bunny Christie set dotted with period East German technology including fridge and tape machine – regularly transforms verbally and physically into other women and men.
When the play premiered, identity fluidity was largely a metaphor or aspiration rather than the reality it now is, giving the text another level. The framing has also changed politically. Man To Man had 26 scenes when premiered in Germany in 1982 and first performed by Swinton five years later.
Karge’s new section, featuring the fall of the Berlin Wall, featured in a 2015 Edinburgh fringe revival the dramatist has now written a 28th, addressing the renaissance of Nazi ideology in Germany: “The war dead have risen / In the dark of night.” There is a stinging topicality in this coda being premiered just five days after the far-right AfD party topped the state polls in Saxony-Anhalt. The 88-year-old playwright’s continuing revisions emphase that the ghosts of 1930s Germany still walk almost a century on.
Anthony Vivis’s 1980s English version, revised by director Stephen Unwin, conveys Karge’s knack for vivid imagery. A smoker’s yellow stained finger is able to write an endearment in after-sex sweat on Ella’s body; Hitler youth piss swastikas in the snow.
The show at times resembles performance art – Swinton slept in a glass box as a living exhibit in a 1995 installation – but the performer’s verbal flexibility and perfect pacing make Man To Man compelling theatre. However incongruously at an historically radical venue, this truly is a red carpet event.
