Review: Desire Under the L Train, Omnibus Theatre

Chris Thompson is an established and award-winning playwright. Most recently, he has had success in New York with a play based on his podcast, Two Foreskins Walk Into A Bar, a semi-autobiographical piece about “a loser gay playwright who survives cancer, gets divorced and moves to New York to start his life over” (taken from his own website). Desire Under the L Train is a confessional monologue in the same vein, but I suspect that this time the piece is fully autobiographical.

Thompson delivers it himself from a chair facing the audience. He tells the story of the abrupt and traumatic end of a ten-year relationship with boyfriend Robert in the UK before escaping to New York City to heal. Except, as he explains early on, he feels he had already done his grieving. What follows is a tale of dysfunctional and self-destructive orgiastic behaviour described in lurid detail. The haze, in which Chris sits for the full 75 minutes, does nothing to soften the edges of some pretty graphic descriptions. Haze aside, the only other cursory nod to direction is a moment near the start when he stands to show a wheeled suitcase and some strange coloured lights that shift at times to suggest moods but mostly seem to be on the blink. This makes it feel more like a staged podcast than theatre, and is probably the origin of the piece. Certainly, the work does not exist in a theatrical dimension in any substantial way other than through the text.

The text itself is reasonably strong. Thompson is certainly honest with himself, willing to be vulnerable in front of his audience and digs deep into his personal experiences. He has a strong ear for phrasing and there are some laugh-out-loud moments that show he has a broad palette of original ways of expressing relatable thoughts in creative ways. 

But the words alone are not enough. Clearly, this is Thompson’s story, so an actor is not needed to voice the piece. But some acting is. Thompson comes across as likeable and mostly relatable, but not as a strong actor. This does matter, despite the nature of the piece, because with the constant stream of sexual and semi-romantic encounters that are related, there needs to be greater differentiation in the way they are expressed, represented, and voiced, and this does not happen to any satisfying degree. The delivery quickly feels monotonous and the content overlong. There is some use of music to provide chapter breaks, but after a while the stream of Marks, Lionels and Roberts starts to blur into a succession of blank faces and it becomes too hard to visualise his tale.

Whilst many in the audience can probably relate to the pain of a break-up, I would imagine only a smaller percentage could identify with his unique way of dealing with it, making it more important that it is brought alive in a theatrical dimension to allow the audience not only to join him in his world, but, more importantly, to empathise.

At the end, Thompson reveals that his overseas odyssey does not heal him as intended. Indeed, he cleverly frames a cliffhanger in which we are left wondering whether he will return to the UK and begin the process of healing properly, or take an option that would allow him to continue to spiral, unhelped, out of control.

This is more therapy than theatre. It is unclear to me how closely this mirrors Thompson ‘s real-life experience, but to his credit, I do hope his story has a happy ending.

Produced by Same Moon Productions
Written and performed by Chris Thompson
Directed by Owen Horsley
Sound design by Max Pappenheim
Lighting design by Jack Weir

Desire Under the L Train was staged at the 96 Festival by Omnibus Clapham and has now completed its run