Man to Man (Park Theatre)

It’s 1920s Weimar Germany and a married middle-aged crane operator dies of an illness he has kept secret from everyone. He is not the first of his widow’s lovers to die unexpectedly but this time she’s not going to submit to mourning and penury. After all, with few unattached men left following the war, and the spectre of hyperinflation still haunting the land, now is a bad time to be a single woman. Her husband had a good job, and had conveniently explained how to do his work to her, so couldn’t she just pretend to be him, at least for a little while? Couldn’t she become Max Gericke? She will need to start by burying his wife…

Thus begins Manfred Karge‘s Man to Man, in its first UK production since Tilda Swinton took the solo role in her breakthrough performance of 1988. This time Tricia Kelly is the gender traversing Gericke, a lonely survivor as German history sweeps by, from the economic woes of the 20s, through the grizzly business of the Second World War and past the dreamlike fall of the Berlin Wall (in a new section written for this revival).

Kelly’s performance is fantastically good. All of her physical mannerisms, her movements and stance, and even her facial tics – the way her jaw hangs slightly, or her eyes slide with drunken cunning – are convincingly masculine. Yet she is equally adept at suggesting how Gericke is always performing, always understands she’s in disguise and has never lost her sublimated femininity. If her voice does not have quite have the same range, her energy and commitment are never less than compelling. Her performance will receive many plaudits – and deserve them.

Unfortunately however the play is not nearly as memorable. Karge’s script has little psychological insight and even less to say about its settings. All too frequently Gericke’s recited narrative descends into a groping doggerel, the rhymes a flimsy parapet besides the hole where a plot should be. Karage’s play seems to regard Gericke’s gender transitions as at a best, an atavistic instinct for freedom, but elsewhere – given its whistle-stop tour of German history – it feels worryingly like Max is being presented as simply a cipher for, or even worse the symptom of, his country’s ‘perversion’.

Most often however it looks like a string of set piece monologues, an actor’s workshop that belongs in a drama school. It’s testament to Kelly’s performance and good work from the whole of Tilly Branson‘s creative team (Eleanor Field‘s costumes especially) that the play avoids becoming tedious long after it has stopped being interesting.