Tilda Swinton has returned to the London stage in Manfred Karge's one-person play Man To Man at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, in a production that theatre critic Patrick Marmion has awarded four stars out of five.
The 90-minute show marks Swinton's return to a role she first performed almost 40 years ago, at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1987. Karge's German-language play follows a disturbed, poverty-stricken woman living through the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, and Swinton is now reprising the part nearly four decades on.
Who is Tilda Swinton
Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the nervy lawyer Karen Crowder opposite George Clooney in the 2007 legal thriller Michael Clayton. She is also widely recognised for playing the White Witch in the Chronicles of Narnia films. Long before her Hollywood roles, she worked closely with the British punk filmmaker Derek Jarman on low-budget 1980s films such as The Last of England, and has kept a lasting reputation for taking on unusual and experimental projects. In 1995 she slept inside a glass box for an art installation titled The Maybe, created by her artist friend Cornelia Parker, which was first shown at London's Serpentine Gallery and staged again at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2013.
A transformed appearance on stage
According to Marmion's review, when the lights come up on an all-white stage littered with scrap yard junk, Swinton appears as a rheumy-eyed, wraith-like figure wearing a soiled string vest and red and white Y-fronts, beneath a thatch of crow's-nest hair. He wrote that she has black gaps between yellow teeth, as though she has not brushed them in a century, with what looks like salted caramel ice cream smeared down the side of her face and green armpit hair suggesting her character might be rotting from within.
Marmion said her look on stage has always been strongly reminiscent of another great and strange chameleon, David Bowie, and likened the show at points to a deranged stand-up routine or a dysfunctional cabaret act.
The story of Man To Man
In the play, Swinton's working-class German character speaks with a Cockney accent as she nostalgically recalls holiday cruises during Hitler's time, saying they were really something. She recounts a life as a street hooker before falling in love with her crane driver husband. When he dies of cancer, she dresses in his clothes, takes over his job, and buries him under her own name, effectively becoming her own widow.
The character goes on to try, and fail, to avoid conscription into the German army. She saves a communist friend from the death camps and works as a farmhand in lederhosen after the war. The production also brings her story up to the present day, touching on the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as the rise of the German political party AfD, a contemporary addition that Marmion described in his review as superfluous.
Direction and design
Man To Man is directed and designed by Stephen Unwin and Bunny Christie, the same pairing responsible for the original production. Marmion described it as a piece of agitprop theatre intended to shock and unsettle audiences, reinforced by hazy projections of Nazi Germany, and said it aims to show how fascism deforms the soul and defaces humanity.
In his review, Marmion compared the piece to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which an old man looks back on the failures of his youth. He noted that other audience members may instead read Man To Man as a study of one character's response to bereavement and grief, as she battles to keep both herself and her late husband alive.
What's next
Marmion reported that the run has been a sensation at the box office and is completely sold out. He suggested audiences should look out for a possible West End transfer, while warning that the show is the work of a performer with a lifetime's dedication to the strange and elusive.
