My objection is nine months to read it from someone who has been part of their history.” (I sought a response from the Royal Court, but nobody at the theatre was available for comment.)Įventually, Gently Down the Stream was staged at the Park Theatre in north London as Sherman turned 80 in 2019.
We’re booked up for the next two and a half years.’” They had every right not to do the play. And if you like the play would you schedule it for production?’ She said, ‘Oh no no no no. “I said, ‘uh-huh? So you want a reading with sandwiches. So I wrote a furious letter.” The apologetic response from artistic director Vicky Featherstone yielded lunch, plus warm praise for the play and a proposal to schedule a reading “with sandwiches”. “Nine months went by and they hadn’t read it. “I thought it was a great counterpoint to Bent,” he says. “We couldn’t get anyone to read it.” One of those theatres was the Royal Court, which in 1979 had staged Bent, Sherman’s ground-breaking play about the internment of homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps starring Ian McKellen. “It’s not just that we couldn’t get a production,” frets Sherman.
It told the important story of a gay man’s experience of the 20 th century. How old must a playwright be to feel invisible? Martin Sherman, now 84, was in his late 70s when he last sent a new play out to theatres.
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