Writer Claudio Macor has a knack for breathing fresh dramatic life into apparently familiar historical materials and giving them a resonance for modern debates that avoids didacticism. This talent is very much in evidence in this revival of Savage. The play was first performed a decade ago, and it is still compelling today, partly for the quality of the writing and dramatic scenario, and partly because inexplicably we are no further forward in criminalising gay conversion therapy, the issue that lies at its core.
This is a play driven by character and plot and contemporary resonance, not period detail. This is essentially black box theatre with furniture moved around by the cast, and a couple of video panels set into the walls that project a street scene, a painting or a medical chart to suggest a certain setting.
After a drag rendition of Lili Marlene, suggesting a nightclub, we shift to a furtive street scene between Danish Nikolai and American diplomat Zack, linked in a relationship that has shifted from licit to forbidden thanks to the German occupation of Copenhagen. When they are arrested the action shifts to a medical consulting room where self-satisfied GP Carl Peter Vaernet is looking for suitable homosexual men on whom he can chemically experiment to demonstrate a ‘cure’ that will make his reputation. In a highly uncomfortable scene he is presented with Nikolai by an SS General who stays to watch the experiment, sipping champagne for his own entertainment.
The remaining episodes of the action follow the timeline of World War Two and play out the consequences for all concerned, much of it based on the historical record as it has been recovered only in recent years through the activist energies of Peter Tatchell. It is a sadly predictable tale of a war criminal escaping justice set against the courage of survivors and those who risked much in protecting them.
The actors here come into their own in bringing these events to vivid and meaningful theatrical life. As the two young gay men, Kerill Kelly and Matthew Hartley, offer a plausible sketch of their relationship at the outset and a genuine chemistry. Kelly’s role is especially demanding and his raw vulnerability and gritty defiance are memorably depicted in a serious of scenes where you want to look away but his performance compels your attention. As Georg, the drag artist, Jonathon Nielsen-Keen, offers a different portrayal in reaction to a different set of dilemmas, his apparently yielding acquiescence concealing an equal, if quieter, form of defiant resistance.
Mark Kitto, as Dr Vaernert, is all smug, brash bravado when in the ascendant, and deviously wheedling when in captivity and lying to save himself from prosecution. It is a repellent performance, and therefore a fine one, in the terms of the play, and in line with a historical record that suggests few redeeeming features.
But several of the finest scenes rest on the shoulders of two further performers, Claire-Monique Martin and Tom Everatt. Martin plays the nurse, Ilse, unwillingly assisting Vaernert, who then takes action to help Nikolai and reconnect him to Zack. This is a finely-graded study in passionate constraint, that helps to provide the audience with something of a moral lodestar through the play. Equally impressive, at the opposite end of the spectrum, is Everatt’s portrait of the SS General who starts as a Nazi stereotype and then gradually unravels in front of us. Again this is a carefully judged interpretation which manages to stop short of engaging our sympathy while registering a bundle of absorbing and thought-provoking complexity.
Ten years ago, my colleague Richard Voyce awarded the play four stars in his review and today that verdict still seems about right. Both as drama and as an exercise in consciousness-raising the play deserves full attention. My one reservation rests with the ending, which seemed rushed in both dialogue and plotting: after building so much hard-earned dramatic credit, it seems a shame not to unwind the lives of the characters a little further into the post-war world into which they finally emerge.
Writer: Claudio Macor
Director: Robert McWhir
Cast: Simon Chappell, Tom Everatt, Matthew Hartley, Kerill Kelly, Mark Kitto, Claire-Monique Martin, Jonathon Nielsen-Keen
Until 15 March 2026
80 mins, no interval