The curtain drops. The audience shuffles out, shellshocked from their experience at one of 2026’s most fiercely hyped shows. And as they do, Doris Day’s ‘Sentimental Journey’ trickles out from the Royal Court’s speakers. This nostalgic song feels like a quiet plea for indulgence from the trio who first staged this surreal German play nearly 40 years ago: director Stephen Unwin, designer Bunny Christie and of course Tilda Swinton, who’s making a vanishingly rare return to live theatre in the gender-blurring role that made her name. It’s poignant to imagine them all revisiting their vulnerable early career days together – but, of course, any homecoming comes with mixed emotions.
Manfred Karge’s monologue is a strange, multilayered thing – a narrative of one person’s struggle through the lean 1930s, the lethal Nazi period, and the hungry years that came when it all imploded. Swinton sits on a swivel chair and introduces us to her personal strategy for staying alive. She’s Ella Gericke, a woman who’s taken on her dead husband Max’s identity, stuffing a screwed-up dishcloth down her pants and creating a blokey, East End-accented facade to cling to employment in desperate times. Only maybe this pose fulfils a need that’s deeper than pure survival. Swinton relishes her lines, here, bringing a laddish swagger to her tall tale that melts subtly into the story’s other characters: a flirtatious, secretly Communist lunchlady, or a taunting SS Officer. Ella claims that she’s got no political aims, no particular dream, but perhaps conning the system is the most satisfying rebellion possible in this warped society.
Swinton is understated but mesmerising to watch as she powers her way through this story. She looks defiantly weird, with a hacked-off blonde crop, pink crayoned eyes, daubed white paint, and strange skin encrustations, like a mistreated Barbie who’s washed up on the beach. Christie’s design encases her in an inhospitable white cube, with gallery-like walls that fizz and crackle with abstracted historical news footage. Though all the choices here feel calculated to drag this play into 2026, it still doesn’t quite make sense now.
open image in galleryIn 1988, I’d imagine that seeing an actor existing between genders on stage felt simpler – an artistic choice, reflecting on the dehumanising nature of war and industrialisation. In today’s simultaneously more politicised and more nuanced landscape, there’s something a bit thin about the way this character’s identity is drawn. Her feminine side is painted using excerpts from Snow White, poetic snippets of lost girlishness that feel irrelevant to her harshly masculine present. It feels like we’re building towards some sort of fantastical transformation that never comes. This story’s trajectory is similarly powered by an unsatisfying, lightly magical logic. Even though this play’s running time is a brief one hour and 25 minutes, it’s easy to lose your grip on a narrative that leaves massive plot points unexplored. Somehow, Max’s colleagues don’t cotton on that he’s now a woman in drag. Bizarrely, Ella escapes a medical examination by joining the SS, who surely had a rather rigid approach to that sort of thing.
Karge concludes the play with a new section, portentously referencing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the return of fascism to Europe. In its best moments, his writing is strikingly good, full of lyricism and striking tonal switches. “You know, it never rains but it pours,” says Swinton, after committing double murder, and the audience collapses into giggles. At other, later points in the story, it feels as illogical and messy as a war’s long aftermath, held together by a talent for the ages.
‘Man to Man’ is at the Royal Court Theatre until 24 October