Bent, a play about homosexual love in a concentration camp, was first given a staged reading at the 1978 Eugene O’Neill playwrights conference in Connecticut before receiving its world premiere at the Royal Court. Despite the advent of civil rights and the sexual revolution happening in the 1970s, such an unapologetically homosexual play was controversial for the time. Bent became a great commercial success, transferring to the Criterion Theatre in the West End on 4 July 1979. In 1997, it was adapted into a film of the same name.
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