Toxic
Writer: Nathaniel J. Hall
Director: Gavin Roach
Qtopia, Darlinghurst
20 April 20 – 9 May, 2026
Toxic asks what can actually be toxic in a relationship. Is it the baggage we carry with us, or is the world around us poisoning our reactions to each other?
Toxic. Intoxicated. Desire. Sex. Fear. Trauma. Racism. Delusion. Pain… Love.
The one-room Qtopia theatre was once a small public toilet block. You descend into its plain brick guts from the hustle and bustle of Taylor Square, on the edge of Oxford Street. The set and lighting are simple, pared back and understated; a few milk crates and a mattress on the floor. This is theatre for the people, not spectacle.
Set in 2017 in Manchester, England, two men, through the haze of their broken hearts and intense sexual drives, begin a wildly intimate connection. While each is driven and tormented in very different ways, they start the bump and grind of their uniquely queer dance of love. The younger white man struggles with an AIDS diagnosis; the older man is still processing the abandonment of a father, an insensitive, boozy mother, and a world of racism that he confronts daily. With words aside to the audience, like the chorus from a Greek tragedy, they predict their own demise; as they say, it will “end up all fucked!”.
Although the swirl of chaotic life surrounding the couple is, at times, explicitly raw and sexualised, there are quieter moments. These mundane and familiar exchanges, like small cracks, reveal the unresolved that can rise up out of the dark and hidden places of the soul. The lingering pain will damage what happens next. Despite this, and despite how their world conspires to blow them apart, they find moments of love and joy. We know they will not survive together. They told us so. In the end, their tender friendship and self-awakening become a testament to the resilience of love. It is also a queer love, suffused with hope and acceptance. It is tempered now by what they have taught each other. They are better men, with stronger hearts. They will continue to write their story, torn from the pages of a world that continually conspires to end it.
This deeply moving story is performed so naturally and convincingly by Patrick Phillip and Bash Nelson that, at times, you feel like an intruder looking in through a window.
