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RAW, BRUTAL AND TOTALLY BRILLIANT

Bent: "A production of intense power"

Tuesday March 6,2007

By Sheridan Morley

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Bent
Trafalgar Studios, London. Box office: 0870 0606632

TWO years after being carved from the old Whitehall Theatre, the Trafalgar Studios has its first blockbuster hit.

Bent, written by Martin Sherman, is at times the most homosexually explicit and violent show in town.

But it also happens to be, as was evident when first seen at the Royal Court in 1979, a brilliant play about persecution under the Nazis.

Somehow that dramatic theme has returned:next week sees the revival of Cabaret. But even that has its lighter moments.

This is Cabaret without the songs rewritten in blood and sudden death.

Not that it seems like that from the outset: we are in a flat with two gay men, a homosexual nightclub dancer and his friend, but it soon becomes clear that this is not a camp comedy.

We are in Berlin in 1934, the morning after the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler's first mass purge of homosexuals.

It is immediately clear that Max (Alan Cumming in a breathtaking and doubtless soon-to-be award-winning performance) and his friend Rudy (Kevin Trainor) will have to go on the run, even if it ends on the electric wire of Dachau.

Even if you saw the 1996 film, the immediate dramatic impact of the play shows a totally different experience, raw in its tragedy and almost unwatchable in its brutality.

But it is also about the extraordinary friendship that grows up in the camp between Max and Horst (Chris New) even though Max, hoping for a marginally more friendly star on his uniform, has claimed to be Jewish rather than gay. In the end, as well as the vicious brutality of the period, Bent is about the importance and overriding power of friendship, even in the most unthinkable circumstances.