Play, ready for production.

How to learn from history.

 

The ghosts of six gay activists in a Post World War Two Berlin library discuss the future of homosexuality, whilst an ex concentration camp gay inmate plays out his own present and future in the same space unaware of their presence.

Eight characters inhabit a ruined and abandoned library, one character Magnus Hirschfeld, used to own this library before his death and before the Nazis swept away his life’s work on sexuality. He is back now in 1945, as a ghost , and alongside five other academics, also ghosts, who had all added to the study of homosexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Hans Urane, a homosexual survivor of the Holocaust has returned to the only place he could call home in war torn Berlin, to this library, where he used to work and live, before the hostilities. He is close to death, having been forced onto a Death march by the Commandant of his concentration camp. He does not speak throughout the piece but instead shows through a gradual improvement to his physical and mental health, how he sees his future as a gay man in the late 20th century.

All six academics debate the future of homosexuality, but Hans cannot hear them, he has to reach his own conclusions, which he does, when having been caught by a German policemen who is subsequently shot by a sniper, he takes on the policeman’s identity and runs away, leaving the six ghosts to an understanding that homosexuals must start again with only their small collection of remaining publications for assistance.

This piece has been through a process of read throughs and is now available to producers.