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. My German was just about good enough to realise that this was something that had to be seen, and soon Jenny Killick, the visionary artistic director of the Traverse in Edinburgh, commissioned a translation from Anthony Vivis and had the guts to give the go-ahead for what we called Man to Man. Tilda Swinton and I were close friends from Cambridge, and we’d often worked together, at university and in the real world.
She was the obvious choice to play the part. Along with the designer Bunny Christie and the lighting designer Ben Ormerod, we soon had a team, all in our 20s, all just starting out, all making it up as we went along. But our scratch production became a cause célèbre at the 1987 Edinburgh festival, and transferred to the Royal Court for a three-week run the following year.
In a theatre culture devoted to poetic naturalism, it surprised and challenged audiences. Even then, Manfred Karge was a legendary figure. He was born in poverty in Brandenburg before the war, and his talent was spotted in 1961 by the great Helene Weigel – Bertolt Brecht’s wife, who had co-founded the Berliner Ensemble after the war and ran it following his death.
She quickly engaged Karge as an actor. He also became a director, working in many of the leading German-speaking theatres. He wrote Jacke wie Hose, his first play, which he staged with his partner, Lore Brunner, in Bochum in 1982.
He returned to Berlin in 1993, where he still writes, directs and teaches. Karge is one of the last surviving links to the original Brecht theatre. And in true Brechtian spirit, he wrote a deliberately conflicted figure: likeable one moment, repellent the next; insightful and blinkered; reactionary and visionary; but, throughout, a woman from the lowest rung of society, caught up in the disastrous contradictions of her time.
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