Theatre

Directed by History

Stephen Unwin is bringing back ‘Man to Man’ almost 40 years after first working on the seminal play with Tilda Swinton. What’s changed?

‘Never go back!’ it’s often said in the theatre. After all, a performance exists in the present tense, and plays – and productions – change according to the changing times.

So when I heard that my dearest old friend Tilda Swinton wanted to return to the stage after almost four decades in cinema and have another go at Manfred Karge’s extraordinary one-woman play, Man to Man, I thought about it carefully.

When we first did it, at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1987, and then at the Royal Court in London in 1988, Tilda and I – and the designer Bunny Christie and lighting designer Ben Ormerod – were all in our twenties: clever and talented perhaps, but oh so ignorant of the real stuff of life.

What would it be like to dust it off and stage it again? Would we have anything new to say?