Dark Sublime
Trafalgar Studios, June – August 2019
When Oli arrives at now-forgotten sci-fi icon Marianne’s door, he’s looking for an autograph – and maybe a friend. Marianne is hoping for the phone to ring, for her best friend to see her differently, for her turn at something more substantial than a half-remembered role on an old TV show.
As they start to explore each other’s worlds, they begin to discover what every good relationship needs: time and space.
Dennis has written a terrifically funny script […] It’s refreshing to see LGBTQ+ relationships at the heart of the narrative rather than being lip service.
Time Out
While exploring some difficult themes, Dark Sublime is incredibly funny, to the point where the audience were often in fits of hysterics for long periods of times. Dennis’ writing has a naturalistic wit that is so quintessentially British, wonderfully dry one liners and put-downs mixed with sight gags […] think Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies set in the mess hall of the Starship Enterprise.
Theatre Weekly
[…] beneath all the sci-fi trappings is a story with a real beating heart, and emotions that run so deep that they actually seem to require the melodrama of space opera to be satisfactorily expressed. This is a remarkable piece in that all of the major characters are gay or bi, but without that being a driving force of the plot or narrative.
Gay Times
production photographs: © Scott Rylander
Queers: A Grand Day Out
BBC4/Old Vic, 2017
Starring Fionn Whitehead. One of eight monologues for the series curated by Mark Gatiss as part of BBC4’s Queer Britannia season.
Michael Dennis’s story of a trip to London in 1994 gives Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead a Bennett-like platform in which he memorably calls homophobic politicians “desiccated twats”. […] Excellent.
The Guardian
[…] sits triumphantly in the tradition of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads: funny, poignant and closely observed.
The Times
