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By 1975 he was travelling back and forth between London and the States. That year he had his first play, Passing By, performed by Gay Sweatshop, the radical theatre company. It starred Simon Callow, and was one of the first plays that featured a gay couple just living their lives — including in bed, the shock! — rather than having their sexuality made into political polemic. “I used the wonderful review it got in The Times to come out to my father,” Sherman recalls, smiling. “Up to then I wasn’t able to be open in my writing about the issues in my life — my mother’s illness, my sexuality. My parents probably knew — they always do, don’t you think? He accepted it as much as he was able, which wasn’t fully, though he loved me very much.”

Sherman got the idea for Bent watching Sweatshop rehearse As Times Goes By, a play that featured mention of gay men wearing pink triangles, the insignia homosexual prisoners were forced to wear in the Nazi camps. “It exploded something in my head,” recalls Sherman. “No one knew about it.”

He found an article by Richard Plant about the subject in Christopher Street, the literary magazine, which later, after the success of Bent, was published as a book, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. He went to a Jewish library and stitched together disparate references from books. The work of Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist who was sent to Dachau and who later wrote The Informed Heart, informed Bent’s portrayal of the interaction between guards and prisoners.

Sherman based Max on a charismatic man he knew and won’t name. At that time there no testimonies in circulation of gay men who had survived the camps, unlike today. I’ve interviewed a brace of these men; not only were they persecuted and almost killed by the Nazis but after “liberation” they were jailed or rejected by their families and peers because homosexuality was still a crime.

The dynamics of the closet informed the evolution of Bent. Noel Greig, of Sweatshop, said magnanimously that the play was too “big” for the company to put on, for which Sherman is still incredibly grateful. The play was sent to gay directors working in the mainstream who, closeted and fearful of their reputations, didn’t want to be associated with it. The Royal Court finally put it on, and gay critics, Sherman remembers, were “the most horrid, writing stuff like ‘This sort of thing shouldn’t be put on the stage.’ ”

But it became a success, and Sherman remembers men coming backstage after the show, “and instead of gushing would just quietly say ‘Thank you’. We thought they hated it. But they couldn’t speak because they were so affected by what they had seen. I liked the fact that it was controversial. Something would have been terribly wrong if it wasn’t.” In the Seventies and Eighties, the pink triangle was the badge gays wore on protest marches. That was down to Bent. It has since been supplanted by the more inclusive rainbow, which Sherman thinks is a “healthy” progression: “One is a symbol of punishment, the other of celebration and time has moved on.”

In the 1980s Sherman suffered from writer’s block, caused he says by not being able to write about Aids, which cut such a terrible swath through his generation. “You have no idea what it was like,” he says. “I was lucky. I followed the safer sex advice right from the start. It was a nightmare. We didn’t know how we would get through it.” Eventually he did tackle it in a movie, Alive and Kicking. His block lifted — he has written film scripts including Mrs Henderson Presents, starring Judi Dench — and he might return to Aids as a subject in a forthcoming movie.

Sherman finally settled full time in London in 1980. He felt he couldn’t fully leave America until he had become a success on Broadway after Bent had been put on there, “to fulfil the dream I had. I could only live here when I knew I didn’t have to be here to be a success.”

However, Sherman doesn’t ever want to be “fully fulfilled”, as that would deplete the stimulus to carry on working, the conflict “between that part of you that feels the work is OK and that part that thinks it’s terrible”. He is single, having recently finished a relationship. Does he want a partner? Suddenly the mouse roars. “Yes, yes, yes,” he shouts. “I was at one of the first gay partnership ceremonies and I realised I was a spinster!” He’s not sure how he’ll go about finding a new lover, though a mischievous glint in his eye implies that he’s not too intimidated by the prospect of the search.

“Every so often you have to do something that shakes you up,” Sherman says, laughing, and to that end he has just bought a house in Greece, “though I don’t speak the language. There are a million reasons why it’s nuts, but I know it’s something I have to do. When I listen to my instincts I’m fine, it’s only when I don’t that there’s trouble.” Which takes us right back to that 12-year-old kid, sitting a few rows behind Tennessee Williams, not understanding all he saw but knowing somehow that he had to be there. The theatre really has saved — and made — his life.

Bent, Trafalgar Studios, London SW1 (www.theambassadors.com/trafalgarstudios 0870 0606632), booking to Jan 13