The most intriguing production of the Royal Court’s impressive 70th anniversary season sees Tilda Swinton return to the stage on which the 65-year-old performed Manfred Karge’s play nearly 40 years ago when she was just 27.
Inspired by the real-life story of a woman who pretended to be her husband in order to keep his job after he died during the Depression, Karge wrote this monologue.
Everything about Swinton’s Ella is challenging. As she describes in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way her life and that of Germany’s before and after the Second World War, one side of her face appears to be caked in dry plaster. From the waist down she is wearing nothing but a pair of red Y-fronts and work-boots, part of the garb worn by Max her husband, who we gather died of cancer, and whose job as a crane operator Ella has taken over, disguised as him.
Stephen Unwin’s production reunites the play’s previous team of director, artist and designer (Bunny Christie), who sets the play in Ella’s white-walled apartment. The flat is not so much furnished as populated with objects. From the moment Swinton’s Ella takes two cans of beer from the fridge and pours them over her head a sense of danger pervades the evening as she speaks as directly to the audience as she would if we were standing in her flat.
The accent is working-class London. But the voice is German Everyman – or Everywoman. What emerges is the grind of daily existence through the grim reality of poorly paid or no work, and then war. In such circumstances the fate of Jews is of little or no concern. A vote for Hitler is a vote for war, says Ella. This would be particularly bad news because her alter ego Max would be conscripted into the army where there would be much less chance of hiding the genitalia behind a set of Y-Fronts. As the endgame of war plays out Ella shoots two SS men who were threatening to rape her. Yet here is no promise of sanctuary with the brutal Russian advance.
Swinton is ironic, mischievous and has the dangerous presence of a loose canon. But the question of how well the play stands up since it was first seen in Germany in 1982 under the title Jacke wie Hose (Jacket like Trousers), is not fully answered because this version has newly written scenes.
The chilling return of the far right brings the play right up to date just as Alternative for Germany (AfD) wins Saxony.
The neo-Nazis are not specifically mentioned, but with the walls of Ella’s flat festooned with projections of swastikas, they don’t have to be. Less well worked is the moment when the red tape that divided the apartment in the first version is, this time, pulled up. The Berlin wall has fallen, announces Ella. This triggers unintended chuckles that I took to be the sheer inadequacy of a theatrical device that must have seemed inspired to the fresh-faced theatre-makers 40 years ago.
So not everything ages well. But this is vintage Swinton and worth bottling if you could.
Man to Man
Royal Court
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