Man to Man review: Tilda Swinton is sublime in play about survival amid turmoil
Man to Man | Royal Court | ★★★★☆
With a shock of dishevelled blond hair and the demeanour of David Bowie with an existential hangover, Tilda Swinton is perfect as the lead in Man to Man – so perfect, in fact, that this is the second time she’s done it, reprising her 1988 performance on this very stage.
It may be a one-woman show but there’s no vanity behind this celebrity casting: Swinton cuts a grotesque figure as Ella Gericke, swaying across the stage in a pair of saggy Y-fronts and a grubby wife-beater vest. She’s a hard drinking, hard smoking woman, her skin caked in a claggy, white substance and her armpits troublingly yellowed, as if she’d taken to holding her cigarettes in there.
She’s so off-putting that, for the first act, it’s hard to warm to her, even as she shares her tale of hardship and poverty. Growing up in 1930s Berlin, Ella faces the threat of destitution after her husband Max dies a painful death from cancer. Desperate to keep his precious pension money, she decides to become Max, cutting her hair short and slipping into his crane operator uniform.
At first, the question is whether Ella can pull off this audacious ruse without being discovered by Max’s workmates – she can – but the tension rises exponentially as the events of the 1930s begin to unfold. Man to Man is a sweeping history of the 20th century, told through the prism of one strange woman: the rise of the Nazis, the horrors of the war, the division of Berlin, the fall of the Wall and – in scenes added to the original text – the slow creep of the far right today.
Each era brings new ordeals. War means conscription – and conscription means a medical that could blow her cover. The Soviet era brings the Stasi, with its obsession with uniformity and control.
As the play goes on, you warm to this uniquely put-upon woman who approaches the absurd cruelties of life with a sardonic smile.
Performed in 2026, you might expect Man to Man to carry a message about gender identity but this production seems to resist that – rather it’s a story of survival, of doing what must be done to get through the day, even as those days have a nasty habit of repeating themselves.