Marching feet, stamping feet, men in black balaclavas, masks, racist chants. In this home atmosphere, and with several European countries witnessing the resurgence of the hard right, there’s no denying the relevance of this superlative revival of Manfred Karge’s 1982 play, translated from German by Anthony Vivis, revised by Stephen Unwin and titled Man to Man (originally Jacke wie Hose). First staged in 1987 at the Traverse in Edinburgh, the one-woman show is now reborn as the red-carpet centrepiece of the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary celebrations. The creative team is the same as 39 years ago: Unwin directs Tilda Swinton, with the show again designed by Bunny Christie.
Karge’s play is about a woman, Ella, who when her husband Max dies in 1930s Germany, puts on his clothes and takes his job as a crane operator. As Hitler comes to power, through the dictatorship and the disaster of the second world war, through postwar division of Germany in West and East, then after the Fall of the Berlin Wall to reunification, history is just one thing after another. Things to endure. A powerful image of working-class female resilience, Ella/Max survives all these changes in a 85-minute show whose structure is 28 short episodic scenes, written as a mix of declaration, chatter, verse and prose, with brief blasts of songs. Plus bits written in CAPITAL LETTERS.
Just as the text is a series of numbered fragments so this is my list of the things I most like about it:
1. I really like Tilda Swinton, returning to the stage after all these years. Great performance, highpoint of the year. Dressed in red Y-fronts, loose vest and heavy boots, she has an androgynous, white-peeling-painted and Cockney-voiced ATTITUDE, very punk, yet sometimes sweet (in the fairy tale bits). Perfect pacing, perfect switches. Gross, defiant and oddly charming. Whether whispering, or eyeing the audience mischievously, or amplified at the mic, or collapsed in an armchair – she pours beer on her head, she slips into lederhosen, she wears a wig and fur coat. BASICALLY, SHE REALLY ROCKS.
2. I really like Stephen Unwin’s directing and Bunny Christie’s vivid set, a jumble of old-world furniture, all dirt and dust. DEAD STUFF. And Unwin’s direction throbs with good ideas, with a pillow for a child and a line of red tape for the Berlin Wall. BLASTS OF BEETHOVEN shake the soundtrack. A splash of red is thrown over the white back wall. Orange plastic cascades from the ceiling. The production scalds your eyeballs. It ends in fairy lights.
3. The text exudes provocation. Phrases from the German, like ARBEIT MACHT FREI, burn the ears; Nazi holiday cruises create wry discomfort; in-yer-face slams like THERE’S SPUNK ALL OVER MY HAND are diffused by laughter. Mentions of Jesus are borderline blasphemous. Then there’s satire on anti-Semitism: the test of being an Aryan, not Jewish, is eating pork: “Am I the pig. Is pork the thing to be.” Boys piss a swastika shape in the snow. But Ella/Max doesn’t care about politics: more interested in beer. Schnaps.
4. The show has a queer sensibility. Ella/Max is both male and female – SHE WEARS THE FUCKING TROUSERS. Absurdly, she’s her own widow, both husband and wife. But gender fluidity comes under pressure as the fascists stick the pink-badged “queers” into concentration camps. A cabaret show is mentioned. Medical examinations threaten. There are cross-gender questions about clothes, language, attitudes, desires.
5. The text brims with brutal poetry. As Hitler gets in, Ella/Max hates “the time between the wolf’s howl and the barking of a dog”. Surreal kicks. During the war, the shooting of Egon the rabbit is a metaphor for THE EXECUTION OF DISSIDENTS. A hare’s severed paw is both erotic and symbol of mutilation. By 1945, “The Russians rape you first, then chop/Your tits off, that’s what I want to stop.”
6. I like the way Man to Man reminds me of OTHER PLAYS. Of course, because Karge worked with the Berliner Ensemble, his play is a contemporary take on Mother Courage. That’s clear. It’s also an improvement on Brecht. But it also reminds me of other stagings of the European East-West divide, maybe Michael Frayn’s Democracy, certainly Mark Ravenhill’s Over There, yes, that’s the one. It’s Man to Man’s nephew.
7. I also like Ben Ormerod’s lighting switches and Matt Powell’s powerful video projections.
This is clearly the play of the year, both because and despite the fact that it troubles me. Yes, fascism is on the march. Not just in Dover or Portsmouth, but across Europe. So Swinton’s strong and commanding woman brings to mind some other strong and commanding women: France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Georgia Meloni, Germany’s Alice Weidel. At a pinch, Thatcher. But does our constant repetition of the dangers of fascism work to habituate us to its inevitable triumph? Does concentrating on the extreme far-right make us forget the oppressiveness of capitalism? Does our obsession with gender distract us from the importance of class? And what can theatre actually do when the “dark times” return?
Finally, there is something a bit odd about the Royal Court’s harking back to the past, such a typically British attitude of nostalgia. So reactionary. Last year, this venue staged a revival of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in the same production as its 2000 premiere; now it restages Man to Man with the same creative team that originally put it on. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with revivals, but wouldn’t it be refreshing to give other creatives a chance?
