Theatre Review: Smoke at Nottingham Playhouse

The house lights stay on throughout SMOKE.

It's a simple choice, but an unsettling one. Theatre usually offers somewhere to hide. Darkness creates distance, a thin barrier between audience and performer. Here, that barrier never arrives. Every reaction, every shift in your seat, every moment of discomfort remains visible. For a play concerned with grief, loneliness and the ways we perform ourselves online, it feels entirely deliberate.

Created and performed by Alexis Gregory and directed by Campbell X, SMOKE begins with an impossible message. Alex wakes to find a new Instagram notification from his boyfriend Ben… who died 2 years ago. 
What initially appears to be a strange technological glitch quickly spirals into something darker. Gregory's script moves fluidly between comedy, thriller and emotional excavation, exploring not just loss but the strange digital afterlives we now leave behind.

The setup could easily have drifted into gimmick or melodrama. Instead, Gregory keeps the story grounded in something recognisably human: the desperate temptation to keep talking to someone who is no longer there.

The performance itself is remarkable.

Raw and stripped back, Gregory carries the entire production through direct address and conversational storytelling. There is very little to hide behind. No elaborate staging. No visual distractions. Just a performer holding a room's attention for ninety minutes and pulling them steadily deeper into a character's unravelling.

The result is often funny. Sometimes savagely so. Gregory's humour arrives unexpectedly, surfacing through observations about queer culture, dating, drugs, social media absurdities and the everyday chaos of modern life. References to "the Demon Twink in Starbucks" sit comfortably alongside moments of genuine emotional tenderness.

That balance is one of the production's greatest strengths. The comedy never undercuts the darker material. Instead, it sharpens it.
Some of the most affecting moments arrive quietly. A memory. A confession. A fleeting glimpse of vulnerability before the next joke lands. Gregory understands that grief rarely unfolds as pure tragedy. It arrives tangled up with absurdity, denial, desire and self-destruction.
The ever-present house lights amplify all of it.

As Gregory moves through the audience, collapsing the distance between performer and spectator, the experience becomes strangely exposing. Not in an aggressive way, but in a deeply human one. The audience is asked to remain present with the story rather than disappear into it. That sense of shared vulnerability extends beyond the performance itself.

Following the show, LGBTQ+ organisation You Are Loved hosted a panel discussion exploring many of the issues raised by SMOKE, including isolation, shame, addiction and mental health within queer communities.

Too often, post-show discussions can feel like an afterthought. Here, it felt like a continuation of the conversation the play had already started.
Particularly striking was the panel's focus on loneliness; not as an individual failing, but as a wider social problem that continues to affect LGBTQ+ communities in disproportionate ways. The discussion added another layer to the evening, grounding the play's themes in lived experience and community action.

SMOKE succeeds because it never settles for easy answers. It's funny, unsettling and deeply compassionate. A play about grief, certainly, but also about connection, memory and the increasingly blurred boundary between our digital and emotional lives. Most of all, it's a reminder that even in a room full of people, loneliness can remain hidden in plain sight.

With the lights on, there's nowhere to look away.

SMOKE played at Nottingham Playhouse on Saturday 20 June 2026.