Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Five stars
Survival is everything for Ella in German writer Manfred Karge’s play, making a prodigal’s return to Edinburgh with its original English language production’s creators after almost forty years. Don’t mistake this for a sentimental journey, mind, whatever the music in Stephen Unwin’s production might say to the contrary. For Unwin, the play’s late translator Anthony Vivis, designer Bunny Christie and especially its star Tilda Swinton, Man to Man – originally Jacke wie Hose – is an abstract confessional that teeters on the edge of mania. The result is something akin to Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic studies of aloneness brought to life by a shape shifting Mother Courage locked in the solitary confinement of her living room.
Back in 1930s Germany, Ella’s response to the death of her crane driver husband Max is to become him. As grief pushes her to extremes, Ella also needs a living wage to get by. Pulling on Max’s tackety boots and styling out her womanhood, Ella takes on her dead husband’s job, burying herself inside the man’s world she lives in and not coming up for air for several decades. As the world is turned upside down several times over, Ella moves through Nazi rule, the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany being cut in half by way of the Berlin Wall and beyond.
Over the next 90 minutes or so, Ella necks cans of Tennent’s inbetween offloading a series of fragmented reminiscences. Like a live art stand-up routine by an aggressively androgynous proto Tank Girl, Ella shambles about her cluttered room in her dead husband’s Y-fronts, her hair looking like it’s just had electric shock treatment. The clown-like white body paint smeared on her face and bare legs doubles up as camouflage whilst helping heal an open sore.
As Swinton is bombarded by Matt Powell’s projections and Elena Peña’s sound design that illustrates Ella’s flight through history, the play becomes a multi-faceted collage. The red strip of tape on the floor becomes a symbol, not just of a world torn between East and West, but of Ella’s divided self.
Swinton’s chameleon-like presence see her take her time in this co-production between London’s Royal Court Theatre, the Berliner Ensemble and other international partners. Mouthing off in a deep set cockney, and moving between chairs and microphone in a clinically white room, she leaves herself no safety net in a poignant study of a woman alone. One wonders at points if Ella is actually confined to a care home, cell or hospital ward.
Either way, the two new scenes added by Karge since Swinton last performed the play are crucial pointers to how the world has changed. The first marks the collapse of the Berlin Wall that allows Ella to search in vain for Max’s grave. The second chillingly acknowledges the resurgence of the new right. As the latter harks back to Hitler’s reign, it brings things terrifyingly full circle as it bookends a society torn apart once more. For all the ugly fallout, Ella is still there – Max too - in a devastating portrait of a woman caught in the crossfire of a world gone mad.
The Herald, October 31st 2026
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