Savage comedy tackles taboo topics within the queer community

On April 28 the show will be in Studio 27 at the White Rock Theatre, Hastings, TN34 1JX (https://whiterocktheatre.org.uk/); and on April 30 it will be at Ironworks Studios, 30 Cheapside, Brighton, BN1 4GD (https://www.ironworks-studios.co.uk/).

It’s a solo show which Alexis is promising as his most daring and uncompromising work to date, confronting head on the hardest issues currently facing the queer community.

SMOKE draws on Alexis’s own particularly brutal experience of an online hack, combined with several years observing addiction and mental health crises within the LGBTQ+ community, particularly among many young gay men in this technological age

SMOKE begins with a glitch: Alex receives an Instagram DM from his boyfriend who has been dead for two years. From there, the play charts Alex’s desperate search for the truth and subsequent unravelling, exploring grief, psychosis and drug use within the queer community.

Part of the inspiration was the hack that happened to Alexis: “I was at a family meal and suddenly I was getting text messages telling me that I was going way into my overdraft. They'd gone in and emptied my account. And that was just the beginning. I went home and I called the bank straight away and they put a pause on spending but I realised that the hackers were also trying to get into my Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and eventually my Apple ID. This went on for a couple of weeks. It was clear that they were a powerful gang and I think they were international. I was getting notifications that someone was logging into my account in Texas, USA. It was exhausting just trying to change the passwords all the time.”

In the end Alexis took his iPad into an Apple store where they wiped it completely which solved the issue. Alexis suspects the problem was that he had been using a public Wi-Fi network on his iPad. As he says he also made the mistake of having the same password over and over again – something he absolutely doesn't do now.

Another part of the inspiration for the play is that Alexis is part of the LGBTQ+ plus community and comes across frequent online notifications of deaths within the community: “And within the community you can make the assumption that it's either drugs-related or suicide …

“In this play I want to open up conversations about the digital age, about gay men dying and about the assumptions that we can make. And I wanted to do it via this queer thriller which is very urban in its setting. It's also about a hack. We all know people that have been hacked and many of us have been hacked ourselves. There's something very every-day about the set-up to the play.”

Alexis hits the road with it following a sold-out London run in 2024, touring now in partnership with LGBTQ+ non-profit You Are Loved to create a two-part experience for audiences, with a post-show panel that opens up vital, local conversations around the show’s themes.

As he says, the piece invites audiences to fully immerse themselves in Alex’s story. With the lights up and no protective theatrical frame, performer and audience remain exposed together, taking an unflinching look at queer life in the digital era.