Photo Credit: Rudiger-Glatz
★ ★ ★ ★
Review by Simon Jenner, September 17 2026
Returning after nearly forty years to Manfred Karge’s Man to Man, Tilda Swinton appears in an iconic hair-swept profile shot. Frozen in a shout. Like a marble Messerschmidt head. Those expressive sculptures include terrifying-looking yawns. It’s as though this role’s become a monument, a frozen warning from history. Ella takes her dead husband Max’s identity just to survive 1930s Germany. Then it hardens into all she’s got. A partnership with the Berliner Ensemble Man to Man is directed (once again) by Stephen Unwin at the Royal Court Downstairs till October 24. It then returns to the Edinburgh Traverse it premiered at in 1987.
Based on a true story of how Ella Gericke managed a deception over 12 years, it also inspired Brecht’s The Job. Originally translated by the late Anthony Vivis, this new version of Karge’s 1982 original with new sections by the 88-year-old dramatist has been updated by Unwin with first one (2015) and then a final 28th section. Originally in 26, its text moves Man to Man past the Berlin Wall’s demise and into ghost soldiers warning of the AfD, and portrayals of abused Turkish workers. It could hardly seem more prescient, after a weekend of AfD wins in Saxony.
Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.
Photo Credit: Rudiger-Glatz
If time threatens to run backwards, it runs forward too. Swinton’s gender-fluid performance in 1987 might have felt fresh: like life (and history) imitating the art of a Shakespearean tradition. Now we’re attuned. Swinton too – and surely Unwin – have had a lifetime to reflect on how Swinton’s appropriation of voice and gender-values act on a person, as well as other forces.
Swinton herself, with hair thrust up and taped in white, looks half Eraserhead, half Aladdin Sane after scrubbing off a night’s performance. She runs through the set like an electric charge with sudden moments of poise and haunting stillness: Kane Husbands’ movement reflects the mix of Brechtian hip and post-punk feel of the original. Insouciant though she might seem, Swinton’s persona of a survivor dispensing their gambits emerges as deeply serious, if dripping with Weimar attitude.
Bunny Christie’s set is a litter of East German goodies: the fridge particularly looks antique and the TV with its topped arial hasn’t moved far from the1960s. Only the lager seems fresh, which Swinton almost begins by spraying loutishly over the set, one in each hand. At another such moment, the white walls framing the Downstairs set are squirted with a simple jagged line of ketchup, like a Cy Twombly on a bender. With Matt Powell’s stark projections – huge German and English surtitles flash on and off like claxons at several points, as well as graphics – Ben Ormerod’s lighting makes it all appear a museum without walls.
Much of the earlier part deals with Ella’s early life, her lost fiancé, her marriage to Max who swiftly becomes ill. Then how Ela becomes Max, learning all about his operation of the crane: and attendant dangers. The text moves from sparky expositional prose to long sections of narrative rhymed couplets, nodal moments of feeling. There’s recursive moments of childhood throughout: they flicker at points of stillness. And dream-images, for instance emblems of rabbits without one paw. Additionally dark folk-inflections stud this narrative with an echt-folk poetry. Moments shiver with such gritty images; one group piss a hammer and sickle, and others a swastika (Powell’s video excellent here). There’s yellow fingers tracing post-coital words in sweat, red markers splitting the floor West/East. Though it’s the word-images that work most tellingly.
Central to this is the moment Ella, playing Max, gives up her original highly-protected identity, her “dead wife” and insurance. All for the “corker” Puppchen: who’s chosen to fall for “Max” and none of the other men. Now she’s a Red on the run.
It’s a moment too that fixes the ambiguity of Ella’s politics. Always declaring for the middle, she slowly moves implacably against Hitler for his warmongering in particular. This doesn’t mean escape from Eastern Germany, but survival. In one anti-Nazi riot early on someone grabs Max’s groin and are baffled. The war brings fear of conscription, more arrests (her boss for being gay but it’s “only” a concentration camp, not execution like the Reds…). Ultimately a kind of conscription does catch up (and a curious disconnected prison scene), where men with genitals to prove challenge Max. Finally, just once, Max, a deserter tells the truth: then a new peril declares itself. Max has an answer.
Photo Credit: Rudiger-Glatz
Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.
Photo Credit: Rudiger-Glatz
The postwar narrative is like much else in this bleak picaresque, episodic: solid enough tableaux with intermissions (anonymous night sex for a bag of grain which isn’t), and sketching Max’s trudge through closing employment doors. Little would tell which side of Germany this was, and at 85 minutes the text is long enough. What Karg emphasises though is that now with a shortage of men it’s still male jobs that are required, and no-one seems to think women capable of them. Transitions to pensionhood Swinton manages with a laddishly beer-rich swash. Not without one poignant attempt to finally locate the grave of Max’s wife, in truth Max himself.
The end delivers most in its vibrant sub-song now emerging as the dominant tone: “the war dead have risen/In the dark of night” but finding the cry up for fascism: “They listen in horror. They return to their graves.”
Swinton transfixes interest throughout. Using a mic, a megaphone on occasion, what really transfixes is her gruff vocals, her sleazy drawl, her (deliberate) wheezily-drawn lyricism and clear detonative projection; her energy and switchback inhabiting other character and sheer energy, performing with a continual peel on/off of clothes like a Pierrot teaching a life-lesson.
Whilst she energises an engaging, dark narrative one can’t escape its episodic braggadocio as a performative victory. A Tin Drum adult with no hinterland. A true narrative from an earlier time (up to the 1920s) adroitly deconstructed for the 1980s and now. As such it’s preternaturally apt. And like all extraordinary theatre it seems to find the precise moment to arrive. No-one could predict those real elections.
In a very different way to say Sarah Kane’s 4.48, seen here last year, revived by its original cast, director and team, this is one of those rare second chances: one to make good not being there 25 or 40 years ago. A flawless tour-de-force by Swinton of a slightly-flawed yet uniquely potent warning.
Props Supervisor Lily Mollgaard, Voice Hazel Holder, Associate Director Eleanor Burke, Associate Designer Verity Sadler, Associate Projection Designer Michael Fox.
Production Manager Zara Drohan, Costume Supervisor Lucy Walshaw, Wigs Campbell Young Associates, Company Manager Mica Taylor, Stage Manager Rebecca James, DSM Andy McCarthy, ASM Alice Lavelle, Stage Supervisor Steve Evans, Stage Show Technicians Vicky Olusanya, Lee West, Lighting Supervisor Lucinda Plummer, Lighting Programmer Lizzie Skellett.
Lighting Operator Lisa Jayne Gilroy, Sound Operator Bili Keogh, Video Duty Abbie Revert, Deputy Head of WHAM. Nancy Brown, Alterations Anna Barcock, Make-Up Consultant Sam Bryant
Set Illusion Design & Construct, Lead Producer Hannah Lyall, Executive Producer Steven Atkinson.
Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.
Bex Smith. Photo Credit: Lidia Crisafulli
As does the ever-quickening tempo of the narrative, often cab-driven as it were, as connections between characters begin to form: like white-hot filaments or those illuminated chains, that bind in another way too. Ambrose, Pipe and Smith are all equally superb. Smith enjoys the greatest diversity, as beyond Bex and Gigi she’s Twix too. Additionally Smith introduces a Deus ex machina character towards the end, who could have been semaphored – if only glancingly – a couple of times before.
Movement Director Rose Ryan ensures this is a boppy and wild a performance on the floor as you can fit in the Little. There’s a disco beat where David Lewington’s sound morphs from ambient traffic through to techno-clubbing with bass as Jack and Tia, or Tamara and Gigi, get some partying and sightseeing in.
Is the ending a little too uplifting? Deaths arrive not quite where you’re led to expect them, though there’s dark too. And a satisfying pay-off nearly everywhere. It’s a thrilling ride as scenes flick and segue on a head-twist. Wilkinson delights in denser textures than Union, with more actors, and the velocity of his stagecraft is exhilarating. This paean to the mass of gig workers who slave in precarity to make London buzz 24/7 is timely, personal, and a battle-cry with nuance: not easy to bring off. The late Mark Fisher wrote in 2009 at the dawn of the gig economy his manifesto: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? He’d be pleased to see the emphatic answer here.
Casting Director Fran Cataneo Production manager Emma Langan, Stage Manager Venus raven, PR Gingerbread Agency, Marketing Cup of Ambition, Producer Clarisse Makundul.