Last Updated on September 13, 2026
Tilda Swinton’s delivers a powerhouse character study
4.0 out of 5.0 starsTilda Swinton was in her mid-twenties when she first performed Manfred Karge’s one-act monologue Man to Man. The play landed in a very different cultural moment: the Cold War hung over Europe; the Berlin Wall still cut the German capital in two. Almost 40 years after the original production, Swinton reprises her role alongside some of its original creatives: Stephen Unwin (The Conquest of the South Pole) returns to direct; Bunny Christie (People, Places and Things) designs the set. Man to Man is a spotlight on how the dark tides of history brutalise people. Swinton is magnetic as a rough-and-ready Berliner tossed around by Nazism, imperial collapse and post-war modernity. Man to Man captures someone forced to manipulate her persona for survival; it’s an experimental work that asks stark questions about nationhood and identity.
Adapted by Karge from Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann, the play is set in the 1930s apartment of Max and Ella Gericke. The story is told retrospectively by Ella, who is an abrasive, unreliable narrator.
Max is a crane operator who perishes from bone cancer at the start of the play. Ella decides to take his identity, stepping into his clothes and his job and assuming his name. Unemployment for single women in Weimar Germany meant destitution; Ella acts of survival instinct. She tampers with the death documents so that it is she – not Max – who is reported dead. Stashing her own death certificate, Ella begins life as her husband, just as Hitler’s Party is rising to power.
Stuffing a rag down her (husband’s) pants, Ella risks discovery at every turn. Aggressively searching for Jewish Germans, her male colleagues threaten to check whether she’s circumcised. Terrified, Ella joins the SA – the Nazis’ paramilitary wing – as an extra layer of cover. She has nightmares about doctors exposing her bogus genitalia and, when Nazi conscription begins, she frets over how to avoid the army. Dipping back into her female identity, Ella/Max wriggles through German society as a shapeshifter.
There are more scrapes, deaths and political turmoil. The Berlin Wall falls in 1991. Living off Max’s pension (for which she has also toiled), Ella is by now disillusioned with the divisions in herself and her country. Karge updates the script to nod to the rise of far-right politics today: “the war dead have risen/ in the dark of night”. But there is nothing satisfying or circular about the ending of Man to Man. The concept of unified personhood is in tatters; Ella and Max have sufficiently polluted each other’s identities.
Tilda (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Orlando) gives every ounce of herself to the role of Ella/Max. The depth and vigour of her performance showcase her decades-long commitment to the character. She seems to be made of plasticine. The congealed plaster on her face suggests someone half-formed, or in the process of construction/disintegration; she slinks around the stage and changes clothes as if morphing between personas. Portraying two characters at once never feels like a balancing act, but a purposeful stride into the grey zones of subjectivity. This is not an actor fitting herself into a play, but a play folding around an actor. Swinton is Man to Man’s compass.
Bunny Christie’s set is central to achieving this plasticity of character. Swinton vandalises the stage – a white box fitted with 1930s furniture – by hurling sauce on the walls and spilling beer on the floor. Grainy TV footage is projected onto the sides of the box, and an amplifier and microphone give Swinton an alternative medium to read poems and make electronic sounds. If her husband Max lives on through Ella’s furniture, then Christie’s set becomes a still-life portrait of a ghost.
Man to Man meets the current political moment without diagnosing or drawing easy parallels. It underscores the fact that authoritarian regimes are made up of stories about individual people. Manfred Karge forged the play out of a documented case of identity theft from the Great Depression era, Bertolt Brecht’s writing and newspaper journalism. He is interested in how oppression manipulates our sense of self, and, pursuing this interest, offers a play that is itself a product of manipulating real and fictional characters into one dramatic collage. Driven by Swinton’s expertise, Man to Man is a haunting theatrical feat.
Man to Man runs at the Royal Court from Saturday 5 September to Saturday 24 October.
Sloane Square,
Chelsea
London
SW1W 8AS
Want to try something different? Check our review of The Children at Lyric Hammersmith Theatre.
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