Man to Man
Royal Court Theatre, London
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆

THIS bleak one-handed Manfred Karge play first saw the light of day in Britain in 1987 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and it’s back now in London at the Royal Court for a month-long run before returning to its original venue north of the border — sporting the same team that put it on in the first place, with Tilda Swinton on stage and Stephen Unwin and Bunny Christie as director and designer.

Suitably androgynous, Swinton is Ella, a hard-pressed young widow who has fought to survive in depressed inter-war Germany by taking on the identify of her recently deceased husband, Max, so she can continue in his precious job as a crane operator.

We meet her on stage in much later life, slobbing around in her poorly furnished flat in the Y-fronts that have delineated her assumed masculinity.

Recounting, with weary cynicism, the hard years that have followed her identity change, Ella reveals that her ability to swap genders has helped her survive a Nazi takeover and the subsequent tribulations of the second world war, but that in the aftermath she has found little more freedom than she had before, locked as she is into a solitary, joyless, loveless life dedicated to making ends meet.

Neither as a man nor a woman has she been able to shift the power balance in her favour, remaining at the mercy of her proletarian background as she constantly finds herself having to please others rather than herself.

Swinton reprises the role magnificently — tautly and with a great use of telling silences — presenting Ella as an empty shell of a human being who, despite the potentially liberating power of her shapeshifting, has been unable to change the depressing course of her existence.

It’s a sometimes disturbing watch, with Christie’s deliberately disheartening set (rusty fridge, bare chairs, beer cans and an old radio) providing nothing to alleviate the sense of despair. However, it’s also a fascinating spectacle, and one that has been well worth reviving.

Runs at the Royal Court, London until October 24. Box office: (020) 7565-5000, royalcourttheatre.com; and at the Traverse, Edinburgh October 29 to November 7. Box office: (0131) 228-1404, traverse.co.uk