‘Female survival in a terrifying world’: Tilda Swinton’s return in Man to Man

Manfred Karge’s play about a woman acting as her dead husband was a cause célèbre in the 80s. It remains a bracing portrait of a divided person in a divided culture It was Pierre Audi, the much-mourned founder of the Almeida , who way back in 1986 sent me a coffee-stained copy of Jacke wie Hose. Manfred Karge ’s one-woman play is a study of female survival in a terrifying world.

Ella is a working-class woman who takes on the identity of her dead husband, Max, to endure what Brecht memorably dubbed “the dark times”: the 12 years of Nazi rule. But Karge extends this to include the division of Germany into two nation states (one communist, one capitalist) and the reconstruction that followed.

Read the original report at The Guardian.