Outings

This performance’s titular outings aren’t pleasant family trips out to the seaside, but emotionally tense exits from the closet. The authors, Thomas Hescott and Matthew Baldwin, were behind Ovalhouse’s The Act – a 1960s-set yarn of the gay underground that got scooped up to play the West End. Here, they’ve stuck to non-fiction to string together a collection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender coming out tales, crowdsourced with the help of Stephen Fry's formidable Twitter army.

The stories are performed by four standup comedians, who dramatise reactions ranging from fury, to disgust, to indifference in pacy style. Andrew Doyle’s depiction of an emo teenager coming out to his mother is easily the funniest. After he throws a “diva strop” at her indifference, they reenact the incident as an adorably theatrical slanging match. Set decades earlier, Rob Deering’s story of surreal, bleak aversion therapy trapped in a room with Guinness, retro beefcake pornography and vomit-inducing injections is moving in a bleaker way. But these longer narratives are too rare, and set amongst slighter snippets and LGBT historical soundbites in a rapid-fire format that’s better at highlighting their clichés than their universal truths.

Coming out stories tend to be well-worn already, passed around as initiation tokens into a not especially secret club. This is not verbatim theatre – instead, these stories have been thoroughly polished and trimmed to cocktail ring-brightness. They’re compelling, but don’t expect to be either as surprised or outraged as the parents who populate them.

 

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