![]() ![]() He took her back to his flat and she asked for a drink: a cold lager from the fridge, as opposed to warm ale. One evening, Maugham went on a date with Mary Soames, the daughter of Winston Churchill. Maugham had rented a house, which came with its own servant, a man who unnerved him by gliding about almost invisibly. The Servant has its spark in an extraordinary event in Maugham's own life, to be treasured by connoisseurs of British sex and class. ![]() To locate the gay gene in The Servant, you have to go back to its source, the 1948 novella written by Robin Maugham, the nephew of W Somerset Maugham. Harold Pinter's superbly controlled, elliptical, menacing dialogue is able to hint, to imply, to seduce, to repulse, in precisely the manner that gay men were forced to adopt in 1963, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, and when representing homosexuality on screen was forbidden. Homosexuality is everywhere and nowhere in The Servant. ![]()
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