A queer courage in the face of death

The Third Reich haunts the London stage, while Scotland's nomadic national theatre wins Glasgow over with a warring pair of queens, reports Susannah Clapp

Trafalgar Studios, London SW1

Lyric Hammersmith, London W4

Mary Stuart
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, to 21 Oct

Suddenly, the Second World War and Weimar are breaking out all over the stage. Next week a new version of Cabaret opens in the West End. But before that comes an enthralling revival of Martin Sherman's Bent. First seen at the Royal Court in 1979 (Sherman approached Gay Sweatshop with his play, but the company suggested that it should have a less specific audience), this was for many spectators a revelation: a study of the Nazis' treatment of homosexuals, which followed a gay man from hedonism in Weimar to hell in Dachau.

It was not only the subject that made Bent explosive. It was its queasy, courageous mixture of terrible events and flippant sentences. Sherman's play begins with the etiolated and excellent Alan Cumming, an Aubrey Beardsley figure in a kimono, examining the bruises that a stormtrooper lover has left on his bottom after a night in a bar. In flight from the Nazis in a forest camp, Cumming's dainty lover grumbles: 'I'm a dancer, not Mowgli.' In Dachau, Cumming stands side by side with another inmate, overlooked from a watchtower, in front of an electric fence: they comfort each other by an erotic exchange of words; they both have orgasms. There is a sort of dodgy pun at the very centre of the play: camp life means camp, as in concentration, and as in flounce.

You might fear the Titanic effect: a romance hiking a lift on a tragedy. But not in the hands of Daniel Kramer, who, at 29, has directed a string of revivals that prove him capable of firing up any stage. Helped by Robin Don's putty-and-grime-coloured design, from which things are flung throughout the evening so that, at the desolate end, the world of the play is just a slab of concrete, Kramer tautens every moment that could be soggy. That Dachau sex exchange - all grey, quietly lit, with the two men totally still - is spellbinding. And he has found in Chris New - straight from Rada - an actor whose huge talent is unusually matched by his restraint.

Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is another metaphor for fascism, in the interpretation adapted and directed by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson. Kafka's 1912 story about Gregor Samsa, the travelling salesman who wakes up one morning to find he has turned into a beetle, is seen as a political fable, presaging the rise of the Nazis and as a tale in which not just the hero but everyone around him is changed.

The Lyric Hammersmith has been one of the few theatres to combine speech-based and movement theatre and it has never done so to such good effect. Borkur Jonsson's ingenious design creates a downstairs area that is spruce, orderly, stuffi ly naturalistic: the beetle-person's family move stiffl y around it, like Prussian dolls, or clockwork creatures, who spoon sugar into their cups in time to the strange, rippling chords of music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

The bank-official father becomes more and more buttoned up in the uniform he insists on wearing round the house; his daughter bounces buxomly, wholesomely, flaxenly, a vision of Aryan girlhood: at first dismayed, later irritated and embarrassed, they finally turn into persecutors.

Above stairs, where Gregor is trapped since his transformation, is the realm of the mad person in the attic - the barmy brain in the scrubbed body. Everything is skewed. The bed stands on its end; cups and plates stick to the walls. Waking up with his limbs akimbo, poking out of his sheets with the face of a human and the angular shape of an insect, Gregor is played by Gardarsson (one of Iceland's national gymnastic team) with a pouncing, terrified athleticism. He manoeuvres himself downstairs by squatting on all fours on the ban ister rail; he negotiates a room by leaping on to the table and spinning round a standard lamp.

Shunned by his family as 'vermin', he hangs himself slowly from a rope and is left dangling upside down like a dead larva. As they decide where to dump the inconvenient body, a screen behind them blazes with light and foliage. It's springtime. But not for the entomologically challenged.

The National Theatre of Scotland has no theatre building, no fixed rehearsal space and no set company. What it does have is an ambitious brief: 'to exceed expectations of what and where theatre can be'.

In the few months since its launch in April, the company has mounted an astonishing nine productions and won 10 awards (four for Black Watch, the unofficial biography of the Scottish regiment that took the Edinburgh Festival fringe by storm). The work, not confined to theatres - or even to buildings - has been performed the length and breadth of Scotland, in towns, villages, housing schemes, down the facade of a tower block and in Edinburgh airport.

Given its multifaceted, peripatetic nature, it is not surprising that for its first major classic it has chosen to perform the work of a man who declared that the purpose of an aesthetic education 'was not to fix the mind, but to keep it moving. And to keep it moving by changing the viewpoint'.

Viewpoints, in Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, are never static. He achieves, by complicated argument, what today would be done by nifty camerawork - getting the audience to see the politics, personalities and Bent has a queasy, courageous mixture of terrible events and flippant sentences philosophy of the action from different angles. The crux of the play is an imaginary meeting between Elizabeth I and her prisoner, the Queen of Scots.

David Harrower's version, under Vicky Featherstone's direction, tends to simplify these complexities: two strong women pitted against each other - who will win? The effect, at times, is more Dynasty-like than dynastic (Neil Warmington's corporate-accountant chic sets of beige marble walls crossed with horizontal steel strips; his charcoal-suited courtiers and Elizabethan- frocked queens, highlight this impression) but, ultimately, the tension builds as in a good political thriller.

Siobhan Redmond skilfully expresses all the levels of Elizabeth's dilemma - should she kill an enemy and, in so doing, endorse the execution of a monarch? She reveals the fearful and doubtful individual within the carapace of the monstrous absolute ruler (and the extraordinary dimensions of the renaissance dress). Beside her, Catherine Cusack's gamine Mary comes across as a wayward and petulant girl, growing to full maturity only in the closing moments of the play when, in a truly affecting scene, her confession is heard and she takes communion in preparation for her death.

In tackling Schiller, the youthful NTS is stretching itself. If it has not quite achieved the stature to engage with this classic as equal to equal, it has had the courage to take a clear line through it and, in Redmond's Elizabeth, added to its achievements a performance nearing greatness.
Clare Brennan

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