Reviews of Bent

Anyone thinking that a revival of Martin Sherman's Bent would be outdated in today's more enlightened times should look at some of the reviews. Most notably shocking are comments from Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times, as noted by Mark Shenton in his blog for The Stage.

Judging the gay lifestyle portrayed on stage to be “seedy, boring – and a little insulting”, he [Hart] asks, “Are gay men always so childishly hedonistic and self-absorbed?” (No more so than the average theatre critic, I’d say) He then suggests, “We’re supposed to see Gay Berlin as wonderfully hedonistic and liberated, a happy place of sexual permissiveness and excess before the beastly Nazis shut it down.” And then comes the killer blow: “There is no recognition that the individualistic anarchy of these solipsistic bores often leads to a tyrannical backlash.”