Tilda Swinton returns to Manfred Karge's Man to Man at the Royal Court from Saturday 5 September to Saturday 24 October 2026, nearly forty years after she first played it.
Tilda Swinton returns to Man to Man, the monologue that made her name, at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square from Saturday 5 September to Saturday 24 October 2026.
Karge wrote the piece in East Germany in the early 1980s. In 1930s Germany, a woman puts on her dead husband’s trousers to take his job at the crane works, and never takes them off again.
In his name and his clothes she endures the Nazi years, war, hunger and humiliation. The disguise outlasts every reason she first put it on. The piece runs a little over an hour, for one actor alone.
Swinton originated the role in Britain in 1988, in the production that transferred from the Traverse to the Royal Court. It made her reputation before her film career began.
She now goes back to the part that started her, nearly 40 years later, at an age at which it means something different.
Stephen Unwin, who directed the original production, directs again, with Bunny Christie designing as she did then. The text is Anthony Vivis’s translation, revised by Unwin for this staging.