Bent
at C Underbelly (Venue 61), Edinburgh

Brendan O'Neill

Max is bent.

He should have taken his family's advice, got married, settled down, and inherited his father's button business. But instead he cruises nightclubs, getting drunk, falling off tables, and inviting fat waiters to take part in 'twelvesomes'. This would be all very well in the 'just gay enough' Britain of today - but Bent is set in Nazi Germany, and before long, the SS catch up with Max, and his lover, and transport them to Dachau for being queer. On the train to Dachau, Max is forced to deny his lover, by beating him as the Nazis watch, and is told to 'prove he isn't queer' by having sex with a 13-year-old Jewish girl. This he does, after a prisoner warns him that being queer, having to wear the pink triangle, is the lowest of the low, a sign that you are the scum of the Earth - far better to pretend to be Jewish and to wear the yellow star, so that you can have some dignity when you arrive at Dachau.

At Dachau, Max's lover dies and he develops a relationship with the prisoner he met on the train. The two men spend days at a time carrying rocks from one spot to another, and then back again - an attempt by the Nazis to drive them insane. But it is during this mundane, mind-numbing exercise that their love develops. Unable to touch one another, Max and the prisoner bring themselves to orgasm by describing sex acts, imagining that they are kissing and caressing each other. Under the watchful eye of the Nazi guards, the prisoners have a sexual relationship purely through the power of language and description.

It is a powerful and moving illustration of love and kinship's ability to triumph even in the most hellish circumstances. The C Underbelly is a fitting venue for this revival of Martin Sherman's play, first produced at the Fringe in 1992 and since made into a film. The Underbelly is a dark, cold, stone tunnel beneath the streets of Edinburgh, with no seating. Instead the audience follow the actors around as they recreate first the nightclubs of 1930s Berlin, then the 'hideout shacks' of war-torn Europe, and finally the concentration camp itself.

The youthful, energetic Double Edge Drama group take on the roles of Max, his lover and the Nazis with subtlety and thoughtfulness - never going over the top, which is always a temptation when portraying the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. There were some themes in the play that I found awkward - particularly the recurring idea that being gay in Nazi Germany was even more unfortunate than being a Jew. This to me smacked of the squalid attempt to reclaim historic victimhood and to demand recognition of the fact that one particular group had it just as bad, if not worse, than another particular group. But this aside, Bent is a powerful production, a glimpse of man's ability to rise above the horrors of war and imprisonment.