Chrsi New & Alan Cumming
in Bent
|
Daniel Kramer’s production of Martin Sherman’s 1979 play Bent is closing early. The revival will shutter at the Trafalgar Studios on 9 December. It was originally booking to 13 January 2006.
The production, which opened on 5 October 2006, stars Alan Cumming and newcomer Chris New as prisoners who fall in love in a German concentration camp.
“After a 12-week run at the Trafalgar Studios, Bent, which continues to receive great audience response and standing ovations, will complete its run slightly earlier than planned,” the producers said in a statement. “In this competitive West End climate, which is offering a huge range of new musicals combined with the run up to Christmas, the theatre owner and producers have reluctantly had to make this difficult decision in order to make way for a new production, which will soon be announced by Trafalgar Studios.”
In his Theatre.com Review of the production, Matt Wolf wrote, “Daniel Kramer's impassioned production of
Bent confirms the young American expatriate as a director to watch, but there will always be those divided about the merits of the career-making play by a rather longer-term American expat, Martin Sherman. Inevitably emotive given its subject matter, Bent in some ways is more rewarding for what it represents than for what it actually is—a clarion call for the power of love, in this case homosexual love as chronicled during the Nazi persecution of gay men… There's no questioning [Cumming’s] commitment to a work whose whole may be of greater value than its component parts. If Kramer's sure, very visually skilled hand—the production, framed by diaphanous drapery, looks perfect throughout—gives Bent a new lease on life, that's as it should be for a flawed play that gives a defiant, robust finger to death.”