Bent casts new light on man's savagery

Bent: harrowing experience
10 April 2012

Martin Sherman's historic Bent, which fixes its unflinching gaze upon two gay men imprisoned in a Nazi death camp, left me scarcely less horrified, disturbed and revolted by its violence and cruelty than at its 1979 Royal Court premiere. Yet scenes of brutality, in which gay men are tortured, beaten to death and shot, scrupulously avoid the gruesome sensationalism of Jacobean playwrights or Tarantino's cinematic blood-baths.

Daniel Kramer's under-powered production even misguidedly dons the velvet glove of restraint when the play turns nastiest, while Alan Cumming conspicuously fails to summon up serious emotion as the wily, anti-heroic survivor Max.

The play now wears a fresh identity. In 1979 it made news by dramatising what had been ignored: that homosexuals were regularly exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. In today's terrorist age, with state-sanctioned torture in Guantanamo and religious fundamentalists eager to blood gay men, Sherman's play seems more about human-beings' inherent savagery and capacity for hatred than homosexuality.

It begins the day after Hitler's Night of the Long Knives. At first the mood seems light-hearted. Sherman gently mocks frivolous, sex-mad queens.

Cumming's unsuitably bland Max, a frivolous hedonist, rises hung-over and bruised, the afternoon after a night of cocaine and S&M with his blond pickup. Max's dancer-boyfriend Rudy (Kevin Traynor) aimlessly chatters until the idyll is shattered by the arrival of ridiculously camp gestapo officers, a murder and the necessity for Max and Rudy to flee the city.

Betrayal and the battle for survival become dominating themes, as the pair appeal to transvestite Greta in her nightclub and squabble when literally camping in the forest. Once in the cattle-truck en route to the death-camp, Bent takes a sickening, believable lurch into the nightmarish. Kramer's rather Brechtian production disappointingly scorns scenic evocation, but here designer Robin Don's double compartment truck functions well as a two-piece torture chamber in which Max only survives by assisting in Rudy's murder.

It is the play's cruel irony that Max, for whom love has mattered little, discovers the real thing in the death-camp, where he successfully acquires a Jewish identity rather than the ultimate stigma of the pink triangle, worn by Horst (Chris New). Cumming's light, stiff, shuttered performance cracks no hearts even at the poignant finale, but New, fresh to the London stage, all haggard and harrowed, shattering in fear and anxiety, steals the show.

Bent
Trafalgar Studios
Whitehall, SW1A 2DY

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