Bent bureaucrats, ‘fake dykes’ and bad bakers — this week’s theatre

Eye of a Needle, by newcomer Chris MacDonald, looks at homosexuality and asylum. Gays from the Third World, who’ve suppressed all evidence of their orientation at home, find they have to leap out of the closet once they reach the UK, and provide documentary proof of their hot-tub marathons and nitrate-fuelled rubdowns. Lots of comic potential there.

We open with a boastful Ugandan describing his ten-in-a-bed shenanigans to a shy English civil servant, who transcribes his X-rated testimony with silent professionalism. The message is upbeat: good old Britain helps grateful refugees escape from tyranny and prejudice. Then everything curdles. We meet Natale, a Ugandan lesbian, who treats the application process as an affront to her dignity. She acts like a returning movie star whose passport has been mislaid by bungling pen-pushers. Britain, she hints, should roll out the red carpet for her, and count itself lucky. It turns out she’s a counterfeit gay whose wicked scheme is to win a passport by seducing her adjudicator.