An engaging storyteller but not enough to bring the show fully to life.

Homobesity is the autobiographical one-man show telling stories and musings from the life of a gay man called Connor. The show touches on topics such as, as the name suggests, being gay and being obese as well as discovering physical and psychological about yourself that you do not learn growing up in a religious community in Ireland.

While I will refer to this as a show, it really felt far more like a lecture or a ted talk than a show. It is just Connor on stage with a stool, telling stories about his life and utilising a faux interview style at one point and some poetry to get his life story and musings on his life across to the audience. The Lion and Unicorn is a very intimate theatre, and this suited this show well as Connor comes across as very likeable and engaging, so you quickly feel like you’re just listening to a friend tell stories. In a larger space I think this show would struggle to get that connection that it needs.

My primary criticism of this show comes down to its lack of thematic structure and I felt that it was really missing a stronger throughline throughout. Some sections are solely about being overweight, others solely about being gay, and others about poor sexual education, but I felt that there were opportunities missed to really explore these ideas in parallel and how they relate to each other. As a larger gay man myself, I was expecting this show to be an exploration of the specific issues that LGBT men have to face when it comes to fatphobia and body image issues, but this is never shown. There are comments on fatphobia and comments on homophobia, but I felt that this was a missed opportunity to explore when they both intersect. Instead, they were treated quite separately, and it would have helped the show seem more cohesive if these different themes were brought together more.

My criticism is perhaps a symptom of this show being very real, in that it is telling true stories and thoughts from Connor himself, and so narrative changes would be difficult to achieve without moving away from this truth. I do however think that the decision to tell the stories chronologically (the very first story being the exception) was perhaps a mistake, and a more thematic grouping of them could have been better.

Connor as a performer seemed to be slightly nervous on stage, however this nervousness did go away once he got more into some of the stories, and he seemed to enjoy his time in the spotlight. The stories are the strongest sections as he is a very compelling story teller and there are sufficient laugh out loud moments to keep you engaged. Some of the non-story sections though I was less fond of and Connor seemed less comfortable performing. In particular the “Fuck you thin people” section felt particularly out of tune with the rest of the show. This section expressed a lot of anger that was not clearly present throughout the other sections, and so it stood out as an anomaly and I was unsure of what the desired effect of this section was.

At 60 minutes this show is probably the correct length, as much longer I think there would have had to have been more variety to prevent the show being a bit monotonous. My big struggle with this show is that I am not sure who I would recommend it to. Individual stories I would probably send my friends videos of in 5–10-minute chunks, but as a 60-minute performance I am not sure there is enough of interest for me to recommend to people. Connor does have interesting, funny, and heart-breaking stories to tell, but this just may not be the best format for these stories to be heard.