Director Bruce Guthrie reflects on the return of Manfred Karge's play Man to Man, starring Tilda Swinton, which is being revived following its groundbreaking run in the 1980s. The one-woman play depicts a working-class woman, Ella, who assumes the identity of her dead husband to survive Nazi rule and the subsequent division of Germany, and it remains a striking exploration of fractured identity that resonated strongly with audiences when it first challenged the naturalistic conventions of British theatre.

The original production, commissioned by Edinburgh's Traverse theatre with a translation by Anthony Vivis, became a sensation at the 1987 Edinburgh festival before transferring to the Royal Court in 1988, launching the careers of its then twentysomething creative team, including Swinton, designer Bunny Christie and lighting designer Ben Ormerod. For this revival, playwright Karge, now one of the last living links to Bertolt Brecht's theatre tradition, has written two new scenes reflecting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resurgence of the German far right, while the original team returns alongside younger collaborators to reinterpret the text for contemporary audiences.