{"id":68808,"date":"2026-10-27T10:59:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/?p=68808"},"modified":"2026-10-27T11:00:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T11:00:27","slug":"man-to-man-but-what-kind-of-man-tilda-swinton-in-manfred-karge-s-man-to-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/man-to-man-but-what-kind-of-man-tilda-swinton-in-manfred-karge-s-man-to-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Man to Man \u2014 But What Kind of Man? Tilda Swinton in Manfred Karge\u2019s Man to Man"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo by R\u00fcdiger Glatz \/ Royal Court Theatre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some productions are a pleasure to write about: they seem almost tailor-made as a gift to the critic. So many layers, so many themes, so many associations! But among them are others that leave you struggling not only to write, but even to think, because the familiar language of theatre criticism proves inadequate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manfred Karge\u2019s Man to Man, directed by Stephen Unwin and starring Tilda Swinton in its sole role, is one of those productions. There is an unquestionably extraordinary performance, an exquisitely constructed set, an impeccably calibrated dramatic structure. There is also the production\u2019s nearly forty-year history, which in itself would warrant a substantial piece of theatre scholarship. Yet none of this explains why, after ninety minutes without an interval, you leave the Royal Court feeling that you have witnessed something almost unbearable, utterly merciless in its sense of doom and exposure. And it is not a matter of the actress\u2019s costume, although the red knickers and white vest hardly offer her much protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by R\u00fcdiger Glatz \/ Royal Court Theatre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ella Gericke\u2019s story is small, insignificant, like a door handle. You see one every day, grab it without a thought \u2014 but have you ever actually considered the fate of a door handle? The heroine has a real-life counterpart, although the playwright Manfred Karge turned a brief story he had heard into a drama, and the plot should certainly not be mistaken for documentary fact. Back in 1982, Karge heard an urban legend from an acquaintance: during the economic crisis, a woman whose husband had died passed herself off as him in order to keep his job as a crane operator. It was only several years after the premiere that Karge was sent a newspaper cutting confirming the story\u2019s basis in reality: the real woman had lived as her husband for twelve years. Karge belongs to a generation for whom Bertolt Brecht was not a monument to great theatre but a living practice. He staged Brecht\u2019s works, worked at Berlin\u2019s Volksb\u00fchne and collaborated with Heiner M\u00fcller. In 1968, his production of Seven Against Thebes, conceived in response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, caused a scandal. Karge went on to work in West German theatres, including Bochum, where his play Jacke wie Hose was first staged in 1982. Its English title is Man to Man \u2014 literally, \u201cone human being to another\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, in 1930s Germany, the crane operator Max Gericke dies. His wife Ella puts on his trousers, takes his place at work and begins living under his name: first so that she will not starve, then to avoid being found out, until finally the mask becomes the only possible form of existence. Years pass, regimes change, war begins and ends, Germany is divided, the Berlin Wall falls, and Ella is still Max, Max is still Ella, yet nothing remains of either of them \u2014 except this magnificent and terrifying creature who shambles about the stage, belches, swigs beer, and then suddenly draws herself up before the microphone like a steel string, incandescent with the intensity of the hell surrounding her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is terribly tempting here to talk about androgyny, gender fluidity and the nature of identity. But such a reading seems inadequate, pedestrian and dull. This is not so much a story about a woman becoming a man as about a human being gradually deprived of the possibility of being herself. The production\u2019s rhythm is jagged, unsettling, crippled. At one point it even becomes a sound, when the heroine hears repeated noises coming from the stairwell: someone is pounding on doors, and the recurring, approaching, inexorable thud-a-boom sends a wave of panic through the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by R\u00fcdiger Glatz \/ Royal Court Theatre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Tilda Swinton is a master of estrangement, of Brecht\u2019s Verfremdungseffekt. In Brecht\u2019s theatre, the audience observes the characters not through conventional emotional identification but by critically examining them and what is happening. Yet in Karge\u2019s play, sympathy is not abolished, although it becomes difficult. Ella is pitiful, ridiculous, repulsive, touching, cowardly, resourceful. She is capable of compassion and cruelty alike. A slightly, ever so slightly Brechtian Shen Te from The Good Person of Szechwan, who invents the monster Shui Ta in order to survive. But Ella does not possess even the conditional freedom that changing masks might afford. Her mask grows into her face; the costume she has put on becomes a set of shackles from which there is no escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1992, the director John Maybury filmed Swinton in an adaptation of Man to Man, and that same year saw the release of Sally Potter\u2019s marvellous, dark, astringent, cold Orlando \u2014 the film that made Swinton\u2019s peculiar, almost otherworldly ability to change her appearance part of world culture. These two works must be mentioned together, although they are constructed in entirely different ways. Virginia Woolf\u2019s Orlando changes sex, eras, costumes and social positions \u2014 and somehow, miraculously, remains herself. Ella changes only her clothes and name in order to survive \u2014 and loses herself altogether. For Orlando, transformation promises freedom. For Ella, it becomes a life sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Swinton of today is a dazzling diva, an almost mythological figure. Her mutable, proud, aristocratic appearance has long enjoyed an existence independent of her roles. This context matters to the character in Man to Man for several reasons. On the one hand, Swinton\u2019s fame pulls Ella out of the abyss of oblivion, bringing a woman who was nobody back into the present. On the other, Swinton herself returns to the space of her own theatrical past, and one can only imagine what it must be like for an actress to step back into this role, into a theatrical space first created when Tilda was barely into her twenties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by R\u00fcdiger Glatz \/ Royal Court Theatre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We have no right to speculate about what happens to her psyche in the process, but there is something in the very nature of this return that resembles a public experiment upon memory, above all bodily memory. Theatre, after all, usually disappears the moment a performance ends. What remains are photographs, programmes, other people\u2019s recollections, reviews. But here the same person walks onto the stage, with the same body, the same hands, lips, eyes and voice. Only now this person knows incomparably more about time through her own experience, while the spectator witnesses not a reconstruction of a historical event but the history of theatre unfolding before their very eyes. The spectator\u2019s perception splits in two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, before us stands the magnificent Tilda Swinton, with her aristocratic appearance and her command of the auditorium \u2014 the actress herself never allows us to forget it. But at the same time, onstage is a dreadful, contorted ugliness. This creature belches, guzzles beer, spreads her legs, walks like some monstrous daddy-long-legs, stuffs a grubby rag into her red men\u2019s underpants. She writhes, grimaces, behaves coarsely. Her body exists in an agonising rhythm of limping regularity. Every movement seems to demand an effort, and that effort is painfully visible. Swinton works herself to exhaustion before the audience\u2019s eyes; it seems as though what covers her knees is not paint but bloody sweat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then something else happens, something almost impossible to describe. The actress\u2019s individuality expands like an amoeba, devouring the spectator and, for a while, altering the DNA of the surrounding world. You still understand where you are, but the familiar laws of perception no longer apply. That is why this double vision never becomes a cold intellectual exercise: we are simultaneously distanced and engulfed, seeing this incredible Swinton and the wounded, terrifying Ella. We see them both at once. It is difficult not to feel sympathy for Ella \u2014 yet it is difficult to feel sympathy for her, forgive the illogicality. At times Ella resembles a child doing everything she can to pretend she is not hurt, because she knows that if the adults notice her pain, she will only be punished for it. She carries herself with an absurd, almost adolescent bravado. She is not allowed to show weakness or complain \u2014 she would be punished for either. There is no world in which she could find protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by R\u00fcdiger Glatz \/ Royal Court Theatre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Bunny Christie\u2019s set contains multiple layers of time, objects and traces of different eras. A red line runs across the stage, capable of becoming the border of a divided Germany. Old amplifiers, chairs, armchairs, a floor lamp, a scruffy little kitchen, clothes and all manner of domestic junk inhabit the space. Through the sheer virtuosity of its design, the set achieves a kind of untidiness that looks utterly unartistic. It is dreary, as though reeking of spilt beer, cigarette ends and dirty laundry: sight begins to do the work of smell. It feels as if nobody has opened a window here for years. Theatre knows how to make dirt beautiful, how to light poverty picturesquely, turn devastation into an exquisite composition and endow human humiliation with the nobility of an artistic image. But here everything is different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swinton does with her body what Christie does with the stage. What we see is an ugliness constructed with meticulous care, yet incapable of becoming beautiful. Even the famous microphone on its stand \u2014 one of the production\u2019s signs to have survived the decades \u2014 does not remain an unchanging symbol. In the 1980s, it might have evoked a rock concert, protest, punk aesthetics, a political platform. Today we look at it with different eyes. Theatrical signs do not grow old \u2014 they change. Perhaps that is true of the entire production. First staged in 1982, the play originally comprised twenty-six episodes. Karge later added a scene depicting the fall of the Berlin Wall, and for the present revival another, addressing the resurgence of far-right rhetoric in contemporary Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even without these additions, the play could never have been merely the story of a woman dressing as a man. Ella gradually loses not only her name but also the evidence that she once existed under it. In the newly added section, she searches for Max\u2019s grave \u2014 or her own grave, since it bears her name \u2014 and cannot find it: it was bulldozed long ago. There is something here of Ch\u00f6d, the centuries-old ritual of symbolic death and rebirth. But a ritual is supposed to open the way to another life. Ella, however, is given no chance to be born again. Her transformation is never completed. She remains trapped between two worlds, in the Bardo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by R\u00fcdiger Glatz \/ Royal Court Theatre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the finale, Swinton\u2019s heroine looks out over a street packed with a far-right demonstration, a megaphone in her hands. She shouts slogans in which we hear the voice of resurgent far-right politics. Suddenly her figure assumes an almost inhuman scale. She looks down upon the crowd like some monstrous deus ex machina. But the god from the machine in ancient theatre was supposed to resolve an irresolvable conflict. Here nothing is resolved. Nobody comes to save Ella. Nobody gives her back her life. Yet for the first time in the entire performance, she truly screams \u2014 and even now, the words she screams are not her own. She holds up a mirror to the people below. She throws their own words, their desires, their cruelty back at them. As if to say: \u201cWhat, isn\u2019t this what you wanted? Well, here it is. Take a good look.\u201d It is impossible to imagine a more bitter ending to the story of a human being forced to live an entire life under somebody else\u2019s name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brecht wanted theatre not to lull its audience with sympathy but to force it to see how the world works. Swinton and Unwin take that principle to an almost unbearable extreme. There is no catharsis here. No purification. Man is a wolf to man. And never a god to another human being. Forty years ago, the play spoke of the catastrophes Germany had endured. Today its spectators carry with them new wars, new exiles, new ways of forcing people to lie in order to survive. And each brings into the theatre something that the spectator of 1987 did not have. That is why Swinton\u2019s return cannot be nostalgic. Time has not simply passed. It has accumulated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tilda Swinton first played Ella in 1987 at Edinburgh\u2019s Traverse Theatre, in a production directed by Stephen Unwin and designed by Bunny Christie. A year later, the production transferred to London\u2019s Royal Court. And now, almost four decades on, the same creative team has returned to the play at the same theatre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":68809,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"type_post":[184],"column":[185],"class_list":["post-68808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","column-letters-from-the-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68817,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68808\/revisions\/68817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68808"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=68808"},{"taxonomy":"column","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/column?post=68808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}