Martin Sherman
Writing
Biography
Martin Gerald Sherman (born December 22, 1938) is an American dramatist and screenwriter best known for his 20 stage plays which have been produced in over 60 countries. He rose to fame in 1979 with the production of his play Bent, which explores the persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust. Bent was a Tony nominee for Best Play in 1980 and won the Dramatists Guild's Hull-Warriner Award. It was adapted by Sherman for a major motion picture in 1997 and later by independent sources as a ballet in Brazil. Sherman is an openly gay Jew, and many of his works dramatize "outsiders," dealing with the discrimination and marginalization of minorities whether "gay, female, foreign, disabled, different in religion, class or color." He has lived and worked in London since 1980. Description above from the Wikipedia article Martin Sherman, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Known For
Series of single made-for-television dramas.
Screen Two
Ruby was a late-night talk show broadcast on BBC Two in the United Kingdom. The series premiered on 12 May 1997, and was hosted by writer and comedian Ruby Wax. In each episode Wax holds an unscripted roundtable discussion with up to five guests. Framed as a dinner party, guests included actors, writers, stand-up comedians, musicians, journalists and other well-known figures in the entertainment industry. A total of 48 episodes were broadcast between May 1997 and November 2000.
Ruby
Recently widowed well-to-do Laura Henderson purchases the Windmill Theatre in London as a post-widowhood hobby. After starting an innovative continuous variety review, which is copied by other theaters, they begin to lose money. Mrs Henderson suggests they add risqué burlesque acts similar to the Moulin Rouge in Paris.
Mrs. Henderson Presents
Max is a handsome young man who, after a fateful tryst with a German soldier, is forced to run for his life. Eventually Max is placed in a concentration camp where he pretends to be Jewish because in the eyes of the Nazis, gays are the lowest form of human being. But it takes a relationship with an openly gay prisoner to teach Max that without the love of another, life is not worth living.
Bent
Margaret is a shy, pale, middle-class Englishwoman who is reluctantly engaged to her older, twittish neighbor Syl. Both bride- and groom-to-be still live with their mothers in the humdrum suburb of Croydon. However Margaret has been acting strangely ever since a vacation in Egypt, where she stayed with her mother's friend Marie-Claire. She secretly despises Syl, but does not resist when her mother, who has repressed the failure of her own matrimony, insists on marriage for the sake of social convention.
The Clothes in the Wardrobe
An aging actress' husband dies of a heart attack en route to Rome, where they'd planned to holiday. There, she rents an apartment and, through the Contessa, she meets a young man, with whom she begins an affair.
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
Aging opera singer Maria Callas tries to make a comeback by performing in a production of Bizet's "Carmen."
Callas Forever
A passionately committed young dancer is forced to re-examine his career and life when faced with death, finding hope through an older man who becomes his lover, mentor and companion.
Alive and Kicking
During their dog walks on Hampstead Heath, two older gentlemen find their conversations about everyday aches and weather growing into an unexpected connection.
Frank and Percy
Shifting between documentary, historical reconstruction and melodrama, The Empty Plan interrogates the relationship between theory and practice in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht.
The Empty Plan
Max and Rudy are a couple living a decadent lifestyle in pre-war Berlin, enjoying the nightlife and hedonistic parties: cocaine, orgies, and drag shows. After the rise of the Nazi party to power, Max is caught and sent to a concentration camp, where gay prisoners wear the pink triangle and have a status inferior even to Jewish prisoners. Max disguises himself as a Jew and wears the yellow star, hoping that his sexual orientation will not be revealed. Within the daily oppression of the concentration camp, Max meets Horst, a fellow prisoner to whom he confesses his true identity. Soon a forbidden love develops between them.
Bent
"Rose" is a filmed one-woman theatrical performance. A moving reminder of some of the harrowing events that shaped the century. It remains sadly relevant today as racial tensions escalate, and allegations of antisemitism are rife.