Jonny Woo: Suburbia Re-Loaded review — filthy, flamboyant and unexpectedly tender

★★★★

Jonny Woo brings us Suburbia Re-Loaded, an exuberant journey through queer adolescence, escape and self-invention. Growing up in suburban Medway, Jonathan Wooster’s early experiences of sex and desire unfold beneath the shadows of Section 28 and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when queerness was so often surrounded by fear, shame and silence.

Dreams of the big city eventually carry Woo away from suburbia and towards London, before New York offers further opportunities for sex, drugs, drag, performance and chemically assisted revelry. Yet beneath the sequins, debauchery and occasional anatomical surprise is the story of someone attempting to fashion a life for himself, find his community and determine exactly how much he is willing to reveal.

Woo is a charismatic and instinctive storyteller with an extraordinary command of language. His descriptions possess the detail of a Margaret Atwood novel combined with the camp extravagance of Catherine O’Hara. At times, it feels as though Moira Rose herself might have taken inspiration from Woo’s gloriously sesquipedalian way with words.

Nightclub toilets, sexual misadventures and chemically enhanced evenings are rendered with baroque linguistic opulence. Woo makes the filthy sound erudite and the painful wickedly funny, all while retaining a disarming openness. He can move from vulnerability to filth within seconds, allowing humour to puncture the tension without diminishing the emotion beneath it.

The story reaches its most exhilarating peaks when Woo transports us into the clubs of the 1990s. These sequences are intoxicatingly immersive, capturing the sense of possibility found on a crowded dance floor, where music, sweat and movement could briefly dissolve the outside world. A bag of blue pills is passed around the audience, drawing us into the reckless energy of the scene and making us feel more like co-conspirators than passive observers.

The lighting envelops Woo in the pulsating haze of the dance floor, taking me straight back to my own youth. It evokes both the ecstatic freedom of those nights and the emotional need that often sat beneath them. At its best, Suburbia Re-Loaded does not simply recount a memory, it submerges the audience inside it.

Ultimately, this is a hugely enjoyable journey through the experiences, places and people that shaped Woo. Lacy frocks, passed down from an unknown cross-dresser, hang around the stage as a visual motif, but they feel more like an imposed theatrical device than an organic part of the story. Their symbolism is easy to understand, yet it lacks the authenticity and emotional resonance of Woo’s beautifully candid storytelling. The production is at its strongest when he simply trusts the truth of his memories.

Woo’s magnetic presence, emotional candour and formidable gift for storytelling make this an intimate, funny and defiantly theatrical evening. Suburbia Re-Loaded is filthy, flamboyant and unexpectedly tender, a vivid memoir told with sparkle, soul and magnificently excessive vocabulary.

Be warned: there is nudity, an unforgettable piece of anal lip-syncing to Natalie Imbruglia and a sparkling final surprise that has to be seen to be believed. Audacious, preposterous and executed with total commitment, it is the sort of finale that leaves resistance entirely futile.

My God, it is brilliant.

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Show: Jonny Woo: Suburbia Re-Loaded

Theatre: Soho Theatre Upstairs

Dates: Wednesday 13 July to Saturday 25 July 2026

Time: 6.45pm

Running time: 70 minutes

Tickets: From £16

Tickets Available Here