‘Female survival in a terrifying world’: Tilda Swinton’s return in Man to Man — SkimNews
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- Tilda Swinton reprises the role she originated in 1987 in a revival of Manfred Karge's 'Man to Man' at the Royal Court theatre, London, running until 24 October, then transferring to the Traverse in Edinburgh (29 October–7 November) and New York in February.
- Manfred Karge has written two new scenes for this revival — one specifically commissioned for it — covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-emergence of the German far right.
- The original 1987 creative team — the director, Bunny Christie (designer), and Ben Ormerod (lighting) — are reunited for the production, all of them in their 20s when it first became a cause célèbre at the Edinburgh festival before transferring to the Royal Court in 1988.
- In a deliberate echo of history, Swinton will physically rip up the thin red tape that bisected the original 1987 set (suggesting Germany's division) during the scene depicting the Wall's fall — what the director calls one of those moments when theatre 'acts out history itself.'
- The play adapts Karge's 1982 'Jacke wie Hose,' about a working-class woman who assumes her dead husband's identity to survive Nazi rule, the East-West division, and post-war reconstruction; the original translation was by the late Anthony Vivis, with minor revisions by the director.
- Karge, spotted by Helene Weigel in 1961 and long associated with the Berliner Ensemble, is described as 'one of the last surviving links to the original Brecht theatre.'
Why it matters: A near-40-year reunion of the original director, designer, lighting designer, and lead — joined now by younger collaborators — is itself the rarity; the revival's most striking moment, Swinton physically tearing up the red-tape design from 1987 as the Wall falls, turns a 38-year-old design choice into a live enactment of historical collapse the original team could not have staged.
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