Review: MAN TO MAN, Royal Court Theatre
Photo credit: Rüdiger Glatz
Nearly forty years after she first played Ella in Manfred Karge's one-hander, Man to Man, Tilda Swinton returns to the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs to do it all again. The wait, remarkably, was worth it.
The play flies around Ella (played by Swinton), a Weimar-era welder's wife who dons her dead husband Max's overalls, papers and name to keep working, and then never takes them off. Swinton also plays an entire cast, executing vignettes of foremen, Nazi officials, drinking buddies, would-be lovers and more, with deftness. It's a punishing structure, and Karge's text offers the director almost nothing in the way of stage directions to lean on.
That Stephen Unwin's production never feels static or under-shaped, that it finds a real theatrical shape in what is essentially bare monologue, is itself a small triumph of nerve and instinct. Unwin, reunited with his original 1987 creative team, trusts the writing and trusts his star, and mostly lets scene bleed into scene through pure momentum rather than directorial scaffolding.
Bunny Christie's design does a great deal of that shaping work. Ella/Max's world cleverly accretes object by object rather than through exposition in the clever, faintly Brechtian container. It is clean enough to feel abstract, and yet cluttered enough to feel lived-in. This gives Swinton somewhere to leave the wreckage of an entire life by the final curtain.
And then there's Swinton herself. Watching her tip from Ella into Max and out again, and then further out into a dozen barked, sneered or wheedled bit-parts, all inside the same eighty-five minutes, is genuinely something to behold. A masterclass in vocal and physical shorthand and in how little an actor needs to change to signal an entirely different human being. The Estuary growl she adopts sits a very long way from her own famously cut-glass tones, and that distance is part of the pleasure. This is character acting of a sort that her film career rarely calls for, and she's clearly relished getting to revisit her.
The production also carries two textual additions not present in the Anthony Vivis translation audiences of 1987: a scene marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, staged simply as Swinton tearing up a strip of red tape, and a newer passage gesturing toward the resurgence of the far right in Germany today. The newest passage being backdropped by the AfD posting its strongest electoral results in decades, ensures it lands with a weight and pertinence the original text couldn't have anticipated. Karge is reaching forward to ‘underline’ and ‘bold’ what his play was always quietly warning about.
The density of Karge's fragmented, genre-hopping text means the anti-fascist through-line occasionally gets lost in its own restlessness; however, as a vehicle for one of Britain's shining performers, and as proof that a difficult text can still find a bold and coherent staging, Man to Man is worth the hype.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Jeff Mostyn
Man to Man plays at Loondon’s Royal Court Theatre until 24 Oct, with further info here.
