If a little levity can be forgiven concerning what is a very serious subject, it might be agreed that a drama company composed of students – all that frugal living! – would be best able to supply actors thin enough credibly to portray the inmates of a concentration camp.

So it was with the fine production last week of Martin Sherman’s 1979 success Bent, a seminal work of gay theatre that is too rarely revived on the professional stage. As can be seen, Chris Greenwood (left) and Joe Eyre appeared properly the part as two prisoners in Dachau, Max and Horst, for whom love blossoms during their backbreaking – and pointless – daily routine of lugging stones from one side of a compound to the other.

Theirs is a strictly look-don’t-touch affair – and, indeed, look with circumspection, their every move being the subject of scrutiny by gun-toting guards. Even so, they manage to consummate their love, staring straight ahead into the barbed wire as they bring themselves to orgasm through the power of words alone. It was a great credit to the two actors – and to the skills of director James Corrigan – that this difficult scene was accomplished without a hint of the absurdity that could easily attend it.

Bent is very definitely a play of two halves, which begins – incongruously – with a touch of light comedy in the shambolic flat of Max and his dancer boyfriend Rudy (Matt Gavan) into which has been introduced Wolf (Jared Fortune) – Max scarcely remembers taking him home – a handsome young member of the SA.

This turns out to have been an unwise move, for when there is an insistent knock on the door, it is not, as the flatmates think, the landlord after his rent but two uniformed SS men who step in and shoot Wolf dead. He had been one of the intimates of Ernst Röhm, the homosexual leader of the SA, murdered hours before in Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Gays are no longer safe in Germany – especially those like Max and Rudy who had made no secret of their link.

Having with great moral courage rejected the offer by his closeted Uncle Freddie (Brian McMahon) of escape to Amsterdam – because only he could go – Max remains in hiding with Rudy, before their inevitable arrest and the horrifying indignities that follow. While Sherman might seem to have laid on the horror a little thick, we see what is surely an all too accurate picture of an unspeakable aspect of Nazi rule.