Manfred Karge’s play about a woman acting as her dead husband was a cause célèbre in the 80s. It remains a bracing portrait of a divided person in a divided culture
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.