Writer: Claudio Macor
Director: Robert McWhir
Not so long ago, director Robert McWhir delivered a meat-and-potatoes revival of Claudio Macor’s overlong and exposition-heavy, The Tailor-Made Man, the story of how queer movie star William ‘Billy’ Haines fell foul of silver screen hypocrisy in the 1930s. Now, McWhir tackles the writer’s flawed 2016 piece, Savage, based on the horrifying true story of Danish GP Carl Værnet, an active local Nazi party member who claims to have found a medical ‘cure’ for homosexuality.
The cure in question initially involves injecting animal-derived testosterone directly into the testicles of gay and bisexual men, few of whom genuinely consent to the procedure and some of whom suffer dreadfully as a result. Later war crimes at the Buchenwald concentration camp see Værnet surgically implant artificial hormone glands into prisoners, none of whom consent and several of whom die. “It’s like a vaccine”, the vile quack assures us.
Both Macor’s plays benefit from the honourable intention of unearthing dark, forgotten corners of queer history. Setting that worthy aim aside, one wonders whether either work really merits the attention McWhir bestows upon it. Devoid of rounded characters and encumbered with some awfully clunky dialogue, what little drama there is in Savage (as with The Tailor-Made Man) too often gets buried under the history lesson. One cannot help feeling there is a better play to be written about Værnet’s (Mark Kitto) despicable crimes.
Following Copenhagen’s occupation, Værnet’s determination to eradicate what he sees as the scourge of homosexuality “from Dublin to Vladivostok” finds a sympathetic ear in the newly-installed, Champagne-swilling, “cog in the great machine that is the Third Reich”, Obergruppenführer General Heinrich von Aeschelman (Tom Everatt). The fictional Nazi’s thinking is that if you can get the queers out of the camps, it will make more space for Jews.
Aeschelman, about as one-dimensional a stock ‘homo-Nazi’ as you are ever likely to see on stage, has a hidden secret: lodged in his Copenhagen apartment, bedecked in a louche dressing gown, done up “like a Christmas tree”, is his lover and sometime local drag club owner, Georg (Jonathon Nielsen-Keen). It is not at all clear how Macor and McWhir want us to take the unlikely relationship between Aeschelman and Georg, who performs a sequinned rendition of Marlene Dietrich’s Lili Marleen at the show’s opening. More or less random hints at a BDSM subtext here add nothing to woefully thinly written characters and, in the context of the larger story, occasionally threaten to spiral into deeply offensive territory.
The fictional Nikolai (Kerill Kelly), a Danish art gallery worker, and his boyfriend Zack (Matthew Hartley), a junior American embassy official, enjoy a love-filled two-year romance before the Germans arrive. It cannot last. Their lives are shattered when, enjoying a “stolen kiss in a darkened doorway”, they are arrested late one night by the occupying Gestapo.
Zack’s diplomatic immunity frees him. The unlucky Nikolai falls into the hands of Værnet and is soon strapped to a gurney in visceral agony. A crushingly gruesome scene, one of the few to have any emotional impact, has Værnet boasting of the “concrete truth my serum works” based on the observation that the naked and terrified Nikolai fails to get sexually aroused in the presence of another naked male prisoner. Making up the ensemble is Claire-Monique Martin as Værnet’s conflicted assistant Ilse, and Simon Chappell as a British Major, who conspires to let Værnet escape to Argentina before his crimes can be brought to justice.
Zack’s determination to pursue Nikolai over five years of brutal war at least affords Hartley and Kelly’s characters some obvious motivation, and the duo deliver the best of the evening’s patchy performances. Everatt does his best with the pistol-toting, cross-dressing Aeschelman, but the character so obviously falls into the ‘Self-Hating Homophobe’ trope, destroying the part of others that they fear in themselves, that the actor has pretty much nowhere to take him. “You deserve to die alone”, Georg tells the Nazi. What he deserves more is never to have been written in the first place. A slice of dialogue reminding us that the Germans were humiliated in the post-Great War peace settlement adds little beyond reminding us quite how much Macor loves his unnecessary exposition.
Macor may think it is unimportant why the real-life Værnet unleashed the horrors that he did: we certainly get no indication here. Beyond a few arch looks, Kitto struggles to impart any idea of his character’s motivations, leaving the doctor a kind Machiavellian blank space. Others may conclude that motivations matter in understanding why queer conversation therapy (of the talking, not the war crime kind) remains legal in 170 countries worldwide.
Runs until 15 March 2026
