Bent

Synopsis

Bent follows one man's journey from the hedonistic cabarets and clubs of 1930's Berlin to the inhuman excesses of an oppressive regime. When Max falls in love with a fellow prisoner he discovers the true meaning of love and self-acceptance against impossible odds.

Our Review:

6 October 2006

I have quite a flexible attitude towards Bent, Martin Sherman’s stark 1979 narrative about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in Berlin and, after the purge of the Brownshirts in 1934, in Dachau concentration camp. On the one hand, it's as terrifyingly banal as it is terrifyingly sentimental. On the other, its dramatic crudity and flagrancy is exactly the point.

Daniel Kramer’s revival does not pull its punches in this respect. The play is presented with a defiant flourish, smoke and flame bursting through fissures with a Wagnerian soundtrack suggesting the apocalypse, and Alan Cumming’s Max slithering to his destiny with a devious stickability that just about stops short of breaking out in a chorus of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”.

The role of Max was created by Ian McKellen, first with Tom Bell (whose death was reported in a curtain speech by the author) as Horst, his lover and nemesis in Dachau, and later, in the 1990 National Thea...

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Latest User Review

81.171.142.181) - 6 November 2006:

I was deeply affected --Alan Cummings was brillant....

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