While religious and racial difference is now, rightly, embraced and not celebrated rather than criticised, there seems to be a last frontier where prejudice is still blatantly acceptable. I’ve already blogged about the Daily Mail’s response to Bent – but at least it gave the production four stars all the same, which was an acknowledgement of sorts of the power of the play despite his misgivings. But in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Christopher Hart takes an even more alienating line in his one-star review. Now, it’s not enough to wonder, as Letts did, if gays didn’t have it as bad as Jews did in the Nazi concentration camps; Hart suggests they brought it upon themselves.
Judging the gay lifestyle portrayed on stage to be “seedy, boring – and a little insulting”, he 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.”
But the tyranny of this kind of grand-standing opinionated commentary doesn’t review the play so much as tell us about the prejudices of the critic. And it’s astonishing to see it being paraded so openly in the pages of a supposedly liberal paper (at least more liberal than the Daily Mail, at any rate).
Seedy, boring and insulting? I think that probably goes for most so called traditional and straight relationships especially marriage. What a load of old nonsense some of these critics write, it just goes to show that there is no such thing as objective journalism. If there is any backlash today then it's justifiably against the kind of predictable and ignorant mainstream attitude that exists in our horribly SKY TV and FOX NEWS Murdock media.
Anyway what self respecting individual can possibly think that the Sunday Times is either a liberal newspaper or any different from the Daily Mail. Even The Guardian can put it's literary foot in it's mouth these days and regularly too.
Bent has always been a lightening rod for critics to express opinions beyond its basic dramaturgy and / or production values. If the play were about - as Quentin Letts would like - the torture and murderof children then it would be as popular and as praised as The Diary of Anne Frank, if it were about a Christian man who falls in love with a Jewish girl and at the end assumes her Yellow Star to sacrifice his life to honor hers - then it would be "a love story for the ages", but Martin Sherman's play asks a lot of a mainstream audience - its graphic and extreme about everything - love, sex, violence etc. and because it asks or really demands so much of a mainstream audience it polarizes them and their feelings. As shocking and as bigoted as Mr. Hart and Mr Lett's reviews are at least they are extreme and honest ( no matter how offensive) and they came away from the play feeling something - rather than a neutral 3 star review which does no one - the audience, the creative staff,or the box office - any good whatsoever. How thrilling that a nearly 30 year old play still has the ability to get people angry and result in heated debate.
Sorry, but I only just caught up with Mark's ferocious blog on my review of Bent. Normally I would not re-enter this sort of discussion on the grounds that we critics have the chance to have our say in the papers. But given the brilliant vehemence of Mark's attack perhaps you will allow me to squeak a few paltry words of self-defence.
I thought Bent was well acted. I said in the review that I thought the play had dignity. I tried to signpost that I realised this was a sensitive area and that I felt bad giving my honest opinion. But is it such a rotten thing to suggest that a straight person might have more difficulty than gay people in empathising with the play? Some of the sex talk made me, as a straight, feel decidedly uncomfortable. Again, is it so bad that I own up to that?
In introducing the difficult question of the "choice" that gay men in Nazi Germany had I am doing no more than the playwright, who has a scene in which a gay uncle urges the younger gay man to be more discreet around the Nazis. He encourages him to emigrate to Amsterdam. That would have been to disown his sexuality - but it might have saved his life.
What struck me - unfairly, Mark thinks - was the thought that Jewish people did not have the chance to be discreet. They and their children got arrested.
I did fear when I wrote this review that it might hit a wrong note but I hoped I had phrased my doubts with enough hesitation. Plainly I was wrong and I'm sorry about that.
Perhaps Mark will let me buy him a drink if we see each other amid all the bra-twanging at Cabaret tonight.