The Road to ‘Bent’

Very occasionally a play has a significance beyond the confines of the theater. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778) sounded the death knell of the feudal droit du seigneur. Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Victor Hugo’s savage exposé of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy, was banned after a single performance. Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) devastatingly dramatized the corrosive legacy of the paternalistic past in the form of inherited venereal disease and illegitimate offspring. Eugène Brieux’s Les Avariés (1901) went a shocking step further, depicting in forensic detail the syphilis pandemic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1953 Arthur Miller’s The Crucible mirrored the ongoing witch hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee; three years later John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger gave voice to the frustration and rage of the postwar generation in Britain.Martin Sherman’s play Bent (1979), an excoriating account of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals that is also a story of love between two men in the most terrible circumstances, belongs to this select category. So, arguably, does his earlier, less sensational but equally radical Passing By (1974), charting...