Review: SMOKE (Omnibus Theatre)

Review by Sam Woodward

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We can all imagine how unnerving it would be to wake up to a message from the dead. In SMOKE, Alexis Gregory draws on personal experience to shape an intimate and deeply unsettling solo show at Omnibus Theatre.

Written and performed by Gregory, and directed by Campbell X, SMOKE recounts a period in Alex’s life when a new Instagram message from his dead boyfriend Ben sends him spiralling into paranoia, confusion and chemsex psychosis. What begins with one impossible message grows into something much larger and more frightening, as reality becomes unstable and ordinary encounters begin to feel charged with menace. People on the street, strangers in cafés, even baristas in Acton Town’s Starbucks seem to take on a sinister significance. The result is a theatrical experience that feels brutally personal while speaking to something wider about grief, loneliness, shame and survival.

One of the production’s great strengths is the way Gregory tells this story without flattening it into issue-led theatre. The writing is conversational, sharp and unforced, allowing moments of humour to surface naturally without ever softening the darkness beneath them. A line about crisps in the fridge gets a laugh, but it also becomes strangely important, tied to the larger feeling that things are not quite where they should be and that the world itself has slipped slightly off its axis. SMOKE never overexplains, nor does it ask for pity. Instead, it trusts the audience to sit in uncertainty, working through the instability of what Gregory is recounting without easy reassurance.

Gregory is excellent onstage. He is engaging and often disarmingly open, drawing the audience in with the ease of someone telling their story directly and honestly, but there is always something more troubling just beneath the surface. We are with him, but never fully comfortable. That balance is what gives the piece so much force. Because this is his story, told in his own voice, the ambiguity lands differently. We are not simply watching a character unravel. We are being asked to sit close to someone recounting a terrible period in his life, and to reckon with the instability of memory, perception and reality alongside him.

Campbell X’s direction keeps things radically bare. There is no set, almost no sound, and virtually nothing in the space beyond a chair, a phone and Gregory himself. The house lights remain up, creating an atmosphere that feels uncomfortably hot and exposed. The stage stays fully visible, and Gregory moves in and out of the audience, making direct eye contact and removing any comfortable distance between performer and spectator. The effect is deliberately anti-spectacle in many ways, stripping everything back until the word, the voice and the body are all that remain. That exposure suits the piece. It makes the audience feel implicated rather than protected, as if there is nowhere to hide from Alex’s spiralling thoughts or from the social realities sitting beneath them.

That said, this is also where my one reservation lies. Knowing that the minimal lighting is an intentional part of the show’s setup does make sense of the production’s aesthetic, and much of the starkness works in its favour. Even so, I still found myself wanting a little more modulation in the lighting and sound, particularly as Alex’s paranoia deepens. A stronger shift in the atmosphere at certain moments might have sharpened the psychological escalation even further. The stripped-back form is largely effective, but there were points where I wanted the stagecraft to press just a little harder.

Even so, SMOKE is perfectly judged at an hour long. It says what it needs to say and leaves the audience sitting in its aftershocks. It is raw, rich and emotionally intelligent, and moving without ever pushing too hard for emotion. Some audience members around me were visibly in tears, but what lingers most is not sentimentality so much as the uneasy intimacy of having been let into something so exposed.

The post-show panel with You Are Loved also felt like a meaningful extension of the evening rather than an add-on. Held after each performance and tailored to the tour stop, these discussions connect the play’s themes with You Are Loved’s wider work around community, support and survival. With contributions from major voices in LGBTQ+ advocacy, health and harm reduction, it opened the play’s themes out into a wider conversation about chemsex, stigma, connection and care. One audience member asked how these messages can reach beyond rooms already filled with queer, like-minded people, and it was a vital question. It was also a reminder that while theatre can create a powerful communal space, the conversations it starts still have to travel further.

SMOKE is a gripping solo show that turns Gregory’s own experience of digital grief, paranoia and queer precarity into something immediate and theatrical. Intimate, exposing and sharply performed, it leaves a real impact, even if its intentionally sparse stagecraft occasionally leaves you wanting a little more.

SMOKE plays at Omnibus Theatre until April 25th. Tickets from https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/smoke-yal/