This play, briskly covering a less considered piece of Second World War history – in Denmark, effectively occupied by Germany for the duration of the war, and focusing on the cruel treatment meted out to homosexuals, rather than concerns with antisemitism and the Holocaust – has a Nazi problem. They are not alone in this – within cultural output more generally, it has become difficult to convey the sheer scale and scope of the horror enacted by one regime on its people and on the world at large. This is difficult enough when working with the budget and time of a grand Hollywood movie; it is almost impossible in the small but functional stage of the White Bear with a committed cast of seven.
One option – taken by an increasing number – is to effectively make fun of the Nazis, to ridicule without reducing their crimes. In the UK alone, we had Sam Kelly failing to make the Nazi salute in the timeless Allo Allo or Mitchell and Webb's painfully funny sketch, where it slowly dawns on two Nazi soldiers that they are the bad guys. In the West End at the moment, there is arguably Mel Brooks' best work, the much-acclaimed Producers, where Hitler is – ironically given the subject matter considered in ‘Savage' – portrayed as a mincing queen, channelling Edith Piaf as he blasts out ‘Springtime for Hitler'.
Instead, and understandably, the writer, Claudio Macor, opts for a microcosm approach, considering the political, particularly in the latter scenes in the play, where the British do not emerge with the glory normally associated with World War Two movies, but with a focus very much on the personal and the individual. In lieu of scale, we are given a story focusing on the life-altering impact of gay conversion ‘treatment' on one man – although this is a tale told around three relationships, two romantic – of a sort – and one functional and professional, but no less telling for it. In the last case, the narrative driver of the drama, we have the seemingly suave and sound (he smokes a pipe, which Harold Wilson always thought a sign of reassurance) Dr Carl Peter Vaernet (Mark Kitto), a forgotten man from history, a man who believed he had ‘cured' homosexuality with invasive surgical procedures thankfully only hinted at here, behind a screen, and his nurse, a more brittle, but ultimately caring Isla Paulsen (Claire-Monique Martin). She is ‘following orders' in the surgery, but her unhappiness at the procedures are made clear in a number of ways, from her insistence that she will only work in a hospital when patronised by the local Nazi leader, General Heinrich von Aeschelman (Tom Everatt, staying the right side of parody with arguably the most complex character to convey) to her eventual role in rescuing our central victim, the hapless Nikolai Bergsen (a touchingly tragic Kerill Kelly, beaten down and emasculated by the procedures, but ultimately saved). Vaernet, highlighting both the scientific conundrum presented by ‘progress' – just because you can do something doesn't mean you should (an issue we face at present with the advance of AI) – and the sheer banality of evil, a feature of many diaries from concentration camp doctors, is the real villain of the piece – and frustratingly is the one who got away.
The other two central relationships reflect the complexity of gay life more generally - and revolve around the idea of ‘conversion'. We have the budding romance of Nikolai and his American lover Zack Travis (Matthew Hartley), stealing kisses in shadowy back alleys before the war separates them and Nikolai's nightmare begins (the scene where he is forced to strip and ‘prove' the success of the gay conversion treatment is truly upsetting because it is so simply staged – and so unscientific, both in its cruel method and its claimed meaning, basing ‘success' on one experiment). While there is an eventual happier ending for them – but not before an angry confrontation filled with accusations of abandonment and laments for the loss of masculinity – the same cannot be said for the other ‘convert' here, to a political cause that shields him from himself, the aforementioned Nazi leader who, like so many – Ernst Rohm, for instance, leader of the ill-fated Brown Shirts in the early part of the Nazi story – turns out to be harbouring his own secret, trapping the nightclub singer and owner, Goerg Jensen (Jonathon Nielsen-Keen, resplendent in sparkly drag and bling at both beginning and end, both signs of defiance in different ways), into a five year nightmare of his own.
And time is a problem here. The play, seeking to blend the personal and political in a momentous period in history, moves at too fast a pace, leaving some characters at times reduced to exposition in order to propel the historical narrative forward. The issues considered in this short play – 80 minutes with no interval – are clearly too serious to be lampooned, but too significant to be wholly effectively expressed within the limitations placed on the cast and crew. This needs a longer running time, in a bigger space, where the characters can be allowed to develop still further, their motivations explored and exposed and their complexities considered in more depth (this is particularly the case for Georg and Zack, who are crucial catalysts to the resolution of each relationship but – no fault of the actors playing them - feel under-developed in comparison to their ‘partners'). The play needs to give more consideration to the scale and significance of the experiment – even after it was abandoned, seemingly quickly, after it failed to show sufficient ‘results' and create the ‘storage space' (a simple description that speaks volumes) required for the ‘savagery' of government-led discrimination and demonisation to develop. This work is important – not just because it sheds more light on a facet of fascist rule that has been overlooked by history – in terms of the specific story of Dr Vaernet – but because, in arguably the most chilling moment in the entire show, the small screens at the side of the stage noted that 170 states in the world today do not criminalise gay conversion. This show needs to be seen – and ideally in a longer and more developed form in the future.
It runs until 15 March.
Review: David Brown