Welcome Home review – madcap sci-fi adventure spins out of control

Willy Hudson’s “queer sci-fi epic” has an interstellar theme and rocket-fuelled energy, even if it ultimately remains grounded. A boyfriend breakup at the start brings a Nasa-sized rupture in Hudson’s life as he returns home to his Christian parents and remembers the homophobia served up by church elders which branded him with a lasting shame.

Under the direction of Zach James, this is a madcap show but its DIY spirit tips into unruliness with a too diffuse and disjointed narrative. Lunar-like lumps of foil are strewn across the set, designed by Anna Orton, along with inflatables and images of space (later penises, too) that float across a mound of TV sets that are vaguely reminiscent of Kenny Everett’s 1980s video show despite the futurism.

It is whimsical and wacky but Hudson’s story – one of coming out amid the trauma of homophobic religious rhetoric – does not gain from its intergalactic framing, which seems instead too distracting a conceit. Mainly constructed as a monologue (to say more would be to give away the surprise ending) the opening holds great promise with a savagely funny riff as Hudson vows to delete his ex’s Instagram account, his number, his other number, and his “dick pics”.

But its power melts away as Hudson dances, strips, sings (off-key at times) and takes us back to family viewings of Doctor Who. There is a punkishness to his performance and he has heaps of natural, boyish charisma that makes him eminently watchable. Some of it is delightfully kooky – he eats what looks like an entire mango in one scene. But it strains in other moments, such as when he speaks of masturbating to his teen crush, Robbie Williams, and asks the audience for a sock that becomes a dancing puppet. This is followed by a singalong, which feels like pub entertainment.

There are puzzling gaps in the story, too: he becomes blood-smeared for reasons that are not apparent, and his father, desperate for him to be straight in his teen years, is an ally by the end but we are not told how and why that important change happened.

When Hudson lets go of the whimsy another, stronger tone emerges: one scene enacts a reckoning with a church elder intent on gaslighting Hudson. These moments offer nuggets of power, poetry and pain, and show what potential lies in this production if only it had more discipline, focus and shape.

• Welcome Home is at Soho theatre, London, until 11 February