Revivals of Bent and Summer and Smoke to Close Early in West End

Two high-profile London revivals have announced early closing dates: Martin Sherman's 1979 play Bent, starring Alan Cumming, will shutter at the Trafalgar Studios on December 9. It opened on October 5 and was originally booking to January 13, 2006. The West End revival of Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke will end its run at the Apollo Theatre on November 25. It opened on October 18 and was originally booking to February 7, 2007.

Daniel Kramer's production Bent stars Cumming and newcomer Chris New as prisoners who fall in love in a German concentration camp. The play's producers said in a statement, "In this competitive West End climate, which is offering a huge range of new musicals combined with the run up to Christmas, the theatre owner and producers have reluctantly had to make this difficult decision in order to make way for a new production, which will soon be announced by Trafalgar Studios."

In his Theatre.com Review of the production, Matt Wolf wrote, "Daniel Kramer's impassioned production of Bent confirms the young American expatriate as a director to watch, but there will always be those divided about the merits of the career-making play by a rather longer-term American expat, Martin Sherman. Inevitably emotive given its subject matter, Bent in some ways is more rewarding for what it represents than for what it actually is—a clarion call for the power of love, in this case homosexual love as chronicled during the Nazi persecution of gay men... There's no questioning [Cumming's] commitment to a work whose whole may be of greater value than its component parts. If Kramer's sure, very visually skilled hand—the production, framed by diaphanous drapery, looks perfect throughout—gives Bent a new lease on life, that's as it should be for a flawed play that gives a defiant, robust finger to death."

Summer and Smoke, unseen in London since 1951, stars Rosamund Pike as Alma, a repressed preacher's daughter and American Chris Carmack Entertaining Mr. Sloane, TV's The O.C. as her handsome, dissolute suitor. It was directed by Adrian Noble.

In his Theatre.com Review of the production, Matt Wolf wrote, "There's a lovely pastel hue to Peter McKintosh's for Summer and Smoke, so why then is this rare British sighting of Tennessee Williams's 1948 play so colourless? Adrian Noble's production does well enough when it adheres to the unexpectedly Chekhovian template of a text whose heroine's longstanding unrequited love for the boy-turned-hunky-man next door may put you in mind of Masha in Three Sisters—or any of a half-dozen other Chekhov gals who pined and swooned and didn't get the guy. But the problem announces itself when, near the very end, Rosamund Pike's Alma Winemiller tells her beloved John Buchanan Chris Carmack that her first name is ‘Spanish for soul.' That, alas, is the very quality Noble's emotionally and sexually becalmed staging struggles to achieve, the hothouse passions of America's most affectively keen and clear-eyed dramatist here given a distinctly British wash... This Summer and Smoke gives us the contours of the play—and Williams completists will quite rightly grab the chance to add it to their repertoire—without the roiling emotional content; I left the theatre notably dry-eyed. Much of the problem lies with a performance from Pike that is careful and measured and quite possibly too fully intellectualised to be deeply felt."