Curio Theatre Company

Man to Man
Manfred Karge's 'Man to Man' ["Jacke Wie Hose", 1982] is a dense, abstract, poetic monologue, inspired by an historical incident: "Somewhere or other someone or other told me the story of a young woman who had attempted, during the Great Depression, to hold on to the job her late husband had. To do this, she stepped into the role of the deceased through disguise and other forms of artifice. Apparently, however, the attempt soon came to grief. A newspaper article revealed all." In Karge's text, Ella Gericke, fearing destitution after the death of her crane-driving husband Max, decides to disguises herself as a man, and, assuming the identity of her deceased husband, sets out to continue life as a crane operator in Weimar Germany. But history intervenes - the approaching war, and a series of subsequent events that end with her in a flat in the East in the 1980's. Karge's text examines gender and politics, interweaving a personal story with the great political upheavals of twentieth century Europe.