Man to Man at Royal Court: A major event, if a little boring

The return of chameleonic arthouse darling and Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton to the stage, in a gender-fluid play she first did almost 40 years ago at the same venue with the same production team, is a major event. It’s also, surprisingly, a little bit boring.

Manfred Karge’s 90-minute solo drama concerns a working-class woman, Ella Gericke, who assumes her dead husband Max’s identity and job as a crane operator in 1930s Germany, pragmatically switching between genders through Hitler’s rise, a world war and a divided peace.

Radical in its depiction of gender when it was written in 1982 it’s been periodically updated to acknowledge the fall of the Berlin Wall and the more recent resurgence of the far right, in Germany and elsewhere. It remains disjointed and elusive despite the finessing of its original director Stephen Unwin, and Swinton’s larky, captivating performance.

She is an arresting sight as she stalks around Bunny Christie’s set, a white box littered with bits of furniture and tech from several decades, empty bottles and beer cans. She is lanky and elastic in string vest, red y-fronts and heavy boots, hair an upthrust blonde shock, teeth stained and limbs bruised. Her face scabbed with white and yellow paint, she is a mocking grotesque.

Swinton’s greatest gift – adding ballast to blockbusters as well as passion projects – is authentic immersion into a role, and this is a performance entirely without vanity. The script suits her mutability: she flickers between seeming masculine and feminine, very old and very young, feisty and crushed. The monologue similarly switches between prose and verse, and between different modes of address.

Swinton periodically takes the centre-stage microphone, riffing off the audience like a stand-up comedian. She playfully menaces the front rows with a tube of paint before turning to spray an arc of red across the white back wall, symbolising the start of Nazi atrocities.

Man to Man

Ruediger Glatz

She dons a uniform jacket when enlisted, a fur and lipstick for a brief return to female gender, and lederhosen. At one point she draws the outline of a cell on the floor. Has Ella been jailed? No, it turns out she is a jailer in Hitler’s Sturmabteilung.

The play is not entirely about the rise of fascism, though, or entirely about gender. Instead, I think it is a rumination on the way events shape identity, and a response to Bertolt Brecht’s play Man Equals Man. In that 1926 work a civilian is moulded into the perfect soldier. Here, Ella takes on Max’s identity when it is both dangerous and economically unhelpful to be a woman.

But being Max proves equally hazardous. She risks exposure by army comrades who suspect he/she may be Jewish and being shot by the SS who consider him/her a deserter. A beautiful canteen worker comes on to her – but this may also be due to expediency or desperation, as the girl admits in doggerel that she’s “a red” who, if discovered, “will be dead”. Ella herself reverts to being female when extreme necessity demands it.

The flexibility of her nature may be a metaphor for the accommodations made by the German people in the 1930s, and by Germans and others now. Karge’s latest update sees populists rail against the “Lügenpresse” – the “lying press”, or “fake news” if you will. There are recurring references to Snow White as both a symbol of purity and someone who sleeps through events (the younger Ella also witnesses boys etch swastikas in snow with urine).

Sinister and absurd allusions pile up. Ella talks ominously about being a “knifegrinder”; her rabbit is shot as a traitor; at one point she starts ranting about Napoleon and Van Gogh. The play’s 28 scenes feel simultaneously overstuffed with imagery and frustratingly sketchy. You search in vain for solid meaning.

Not that it really matters. Swinton’s reprise of this show is another monolithic marker in the Court’s 70th anniversary year, comparable to Gary Oldman’s reappearance at the Sloane Square venue in Krapp’s Last Tape this April after a similarly long absence from the stage. It has also ensured, of course, that the run of Man to Man is pretty much sold out.