Play inspired by Tom Daley’s admission meets favour with Giles Woodforde

Billed as the world’s first show based on coming out stories, Outings consists of more than 20 such real-life accounts. The show was inspired by the coming-out YouTube video posted by Olympic bronze medal-winning diver Tom Daley, in which he admitted to being in a relationship with a man. The story made front page news. “But,” Outings co-author Thomas Hescott said ahead of the show, “for every cool and confident young man there are 100,000 frightened and awkward boys and girls who want to come out. This play is about them”.

The show premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, with Hescott and co-writer Matthew Baldwin collecting new coming-out stories right up until the last minute – and beyond. “Those who saw the show in Edinburgh probably only saw about a third of what Oxford audiences will see. There’s two-thirds new material,” Hescott explained.

“I read that Henry VIII was a very handsome man when young,” one respondent told Hescott and Baldwin when asked about the first time he realised he was gay. “A man across the room had a luminous smile — but I never saw him again,” said another sadly. “It was when I played strip poker with friends, with my parents downstairs, watching TV,” a third revealed.

Outings starts with a whole series of short, quick-fire, stories like these, making it clear that there are many and varied routes towards the moment when a girl or boy, man or woman, feels the need to come out.

The show’s second half starts with another round of mini sound bites, this time focussing on people’s reactions on learning that you are gay. “What do you actually do?” asks one, leaving the words “in bed” unspoken. “Does that mean you’re bifocal?” enquires someone else.

It quickly becomes apparent that Hescott and Baldwin are masters at assembling material, and at employ-ing variations of pace, plus lashings of humour, to hold an audience’s inter-est. After the two snapshot opening sections, longer stories are developed, many of which are extremely funny and/or moving. The best written are used verbatim, others have been skilfully reworked, but “everyone who’s contributed should be able to recognise their story, there’s nothing fictionalised,” Hescott and Baldwin promise in a programme note.

The stories were read out from scripts by a team of four actors, David Benson, Andrew Doyle, Caroline Lennon, and Camille Ucan. All four are experts at making material leap off the page without overegging the pudding. The only flaw in the production was some poor sound balancing, which resulted in too many prize punchlines being lost.

As someone who isn’t gay, I was totally engrossed by this show. It shed multi-faceted, but non-voyeuristic, light on a subject that, to my shame, I’d rarely thought about before.