Martin Sherman interview

Thirty years after its first production, Martin Sherman's play Bent is being revived in London. In The Times he tells Tim Teeman why the play still matters.

In a strange way, says Martin Sherman, he wishes — “quite against my own wishes for financial stability” — that his play Bent wasn’t being performed again; that gay life had fundamentally moved on from nearly 30 years ago when it was first performed. But his story of two men fatefully falling in love in a Nazi detention camp is being revived in a new production at the Trafalgar Studios in London. Back then it shocked because it told of horrors we knew nothing about; today, he hopes, it might shock gays out of complacency.

“In the Seventies we thought we had progress but gays were being discriminated against,” Sherman, 67, says. “There were bars, clubs. There was commercial progress, a lot of people were making money out of gays, but not social progress. When I wrote it I remember seeing gay men wearing Nazi uniforms in Greenwich Village which shocked me. I wanted to say, ‘Don’t you realise what you’re doing?’ Beneath all that talk of liberation there was such self-hatred. There was no real freedom or real inner joy about who we were.”

There is a concordance today, he claims.