Writer: Manfred Karge
Translator: Anthony Vivis
Director: Stephen Unwin
Nearly four decades after she first inhabited the skin of Max Gericke in Manfred Karge’s single-hander Man to Man, Tilda Swinton makes a much-anticipated, sold-out return to the role. Director Stephen Unwin has made minor revisions to Anthony Vivis’s translation, and the piece now includes a new scene reflecting the recent resurgence of the far right in German politics. A textbook exercise in Brechtian dramaturgy, the work is more intellectually stimulating than emotionally shattering, yet it remains an incisive commentary on identity, gender fluidity, and precarious working-class survival against near-impossible odds.
Written in a mixture of verse, prose, earthy doggerel, and naturalistic slang, the narrative follows Ella Gericke, a working-class woman in 1930s Germany. Life is good in the early days of Hitler; “you could eat butter by the spoonful,” she tells us. But then her husband, Max, succumbs to cancer. Ella faces destitution and starvation. Her response is coldly pragmatic. She crops her hair, binds her chest, pulls on her late husband’s white singlet and red Y-fronts, and assumes his identity to inherit his job operating a crane.
What begins as a desperate, temporary choice between “eating or dying” hardens into a decades-long concealment. The character becomes, as the show blurb tells us, “a divided person in a divided culture in a divided land”. The new Max digs a physical grave and buries the old Max. Spilling cans of Tennent’s lager across the stage, he declaims, “I am my own widow”. Later, in an uncharacteristic act of kindness, Max gives Ella’s identity card to a Jewish bartender to help her escape.
Over 28 episodic scenes, Max finds himself at the mercy of events, stumbling drunkenly through the ideological meat-pulveriser of 20th-century Germany. Think a foul-mouthed, proletarian, Teutonic Forrest Gump. The rise of National Socialism sees him narrowly escape inspection by boorish fellow pub-goers who seek to ensure he is not circumcised and therefore Jewish. He avoids military conscription by becoming an SA guard, first in a brutal prison, then at a supply dump.
The Soviet occupation and the division of Germany see Max very briefly re-enter womanhood, first to avoid death at the hands of Russian soldiers, then to exchange sex with a farmer for a bag of chicken feed. The alienating consumerism of the post-war Wirtschaftswunder finds him working a mind-numbing factory job, which he ultimately, and ironically, loses to a woman who is paid less for doing the same work. Pensioned at the age of 66, Max spends his days watching daytime TV, ruminating unhappily on what might have been.
Hair slicked up, teeth stained, adorned in crumbling white paint, Swinton delivers an astonishing, technically immaculate turn in an accent that transposes Weimar street-grit into punchy Essex vernacular. Beneath the boorish, self-serving, schnapps-swilling masculinity, the embers of a damaged womanhood are still visible. Yet for all its charisma, visual impact, and sheer technical virtuosity, Swinton’s performance mostly keeps the audience at an intellectual arm’s length, admiring the execution rather than being absorbed by the tragedy beneath.
Only once, when Max abandons guttural grunting, harrumphing, and cackling bravado to talk of his desperate longing for children and to speculate what their first words might have been, do we really begin to feel for this man. The interlude is brief; he soon snaps back into “a beer, a beer and sod the rest” mode, a physical shell hollowed out by the circumstances he inhabits, which makes the diversion all the more powerful.
Bunny Christie’s set is a bright white box that effectively underlines Max’s bleak isolation, serving alternately as an industrial floor, an interrogation cell, and a squalid Berlin bedsit. Props consist of seemingly random pieces of a life: a chair, a refrigerator packed with beer, a TV. Back projections in unfocussed black and white evoke seedy bars, Nazi rallies, and industrial tedium. The effect is heavy on monochrome, but this life lacks colour, meaning, and tone, so it fits.
Having helmed the original 1987 staging, Unwin avoids softening the play’s jagged edges or yielding to any temptation to dwell on Max’s inner life. One wonders how much the new scene, in which the war dead rise to listen in horror to the rise of the new German far right, conveys that the original text did not. It comes across as a little didactic. Yet Man To Man remains a gripping, razor-sharp meditation on what people must surrender of themselves and their identity merely to endure. Unwin’s absorbing direction and Swinton’s astonishing physical presence deliver a convincing, memorable, and highly accomplished evening of theatre.
Runs until 24 October 2026
