PATRICK MARMION reviews Man To Man at the Royal Court Theatre

Man To Man - Royal Court Theatre, London

Rating: Four out of five stars 

Many of us will shudder when recalling Tilda Swinton as the White Witch in the Chronicles of Narnia films – a chilling character with such an icy stare, she looks like she's got liquid nitrogen flowing through her veins. 

Others will remember her for her Oscar-winning performance as nervy lawyer Karen Crowder, in the 2007 George Clooney legal thriller, Michael Clayton.

But Swinton has always had a strong taste for the weird and downright peculiar since playing the androgynous muse of the British punk filmmaker Derek Jarman, in low budget 1980s movies such as The Last of England. 

And let's not forget that she did time sleeping in a glass box for an art installation by her artist friend Cornelia Parker. Entitled The Maybe, it was first seen at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1995, and again in New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2013.

Yet few of Swinton's outings are as memorable, as her 1987 performance at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in German playwright Manfred Karge's one person show Man To Man, about a disturbed, poverty-stricken woman living through the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. And it's a performance to which she's returning almost 40 years later at Chelsea's Royal Court Theatre.

When the lights come up on an all-white stage littered with scrap yard junk, she is a rheumy-eyed, wraith-like figure wearing soiled string vest, and red and white Y-fronts beneath a thatch of crow's nest hair. 

With black gaps between yellow teeth, she looks like she hasn't brushed them in a century. And for some reason, she appears to have salted caramel ice cream smeared down the side of her face, while green armpit hair suggests she might be rotting from within.

Almost like a deranged stand-up routine or dysfunctional cabaret act, her looks have always been strongly reminiscent of that other great and strange chameleon David Bowie. 

He would surely approve of the 90-minute show which sees Swinton playing her working-class German character with a Cockney accent, nostalgically recalling the good old days of holiday cruises in Hitler's time – 'they were really something'. 

She tells of life as a street hooker, before falling in love with her crane driver husband. But when he dies from cancer, in order to survive she dresses up in his clothes, takes on his job, and buries him with her name on the grave – instantly becoming her own widow.

Trying and failing to avoid conscription into the German army, she saves a communist friend from the death camps, works as a farm hand in lederhosen after the war, and witnesses the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the rise of AfD today (in a superfluous update). It is an extraordinary song from the gutter, hailing the human spirit and its ability to survive.

Directed and designed by its original pairing of Stephen Unwin and Bunny Christie, the production is very much a piece of agitprop intended to shock and unsettle. Reinforced by hazy projections of Nazi Germany, it aims to show how fascism deforms the soul and defaces humanity - and will do again. 

Some will be reminded of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape in which a sad old man reviews the failures of his youth. Others will see it as a study of a character's response to bereavement and grief, battling to keep both herself and her late husband alive.

However you choose to understand it, it's been a sensation at the box office and completely sold out. Look out therefore for a West End transfer - but be warned this is the work of a woman with a life time's dedication to the elusive.