It’s often said that some dramatic situations are so intense that words inevitably escalate into dance, song or both. DV8’s ambiguously titled To Be Straight with You makes an opposite journey. The choreographer Lloyd Newson’s company, which is renowned for dance and “physical theatre”, turns not merely to words in order to express its outrage at homophobia but to no fewer than 85 verbatim interviews with gay, straight and not-so-sure people in streets, living rooms, everywhere.

That’s its strength and that’s its problem. Performers also loop, shimmy, spiral and physically fizz; clever things are done with light, chairs, slots in the otherwise blank scenery and, at one bizarre point, horse heads; but often these seem merely decorative and seldom embody the defiance implicit in the troupe’s name. True, the first-night audience applauded the performer with the skipping rope that turned at 1,000 rpm, thus expressing the dizzied mind of a teenager who had been knifed by the father whom he’d told that he was a “batty boy”; but that was an exception.

Still, the words are eloquent. We hear obscene Jamaican “murder songs” inviting listeners to shoot or burn gays. In fact, we hear a lot of Jamaica, one of many countries that criminalise same-sex acts, though there the maximum sentence is 20 years hard labour, not hanging, as it is in parts of the Islamic world. We also hear a lot about Muslim attitudes to sexuality, notably from an Iraqi doctor who fled to England after he was kidnapped and threatened and his lover killed.

There are many who have suffered for their sexual identities, among them a Zimbabwean lesbian, who repeats “I can’t change myself” as she recalls a rape with a beer bottle, and a nerdish few who believe that they have changed themselves into respectable heteros. There’s Peter Tatchell, wishfully imagining Muslims joining gays to fight oppression, and there’s the wife of Ulster’s First Minister, who finds homosexuality “an abomination”.

But could DV8 use its new reliance on words to explore the sheer complexity of sex?

Well, it does sometimes, notably in a section in which a conscientious Muslim recalls an affair with a married imam, still can’t decide what the Koran has to say about things he believes to be near-normal in the Arab world, and wearily concludes: “The one person who can judge me is God.” If only they thought that way in Iran, Jamaica, Ulster and elsewhere.

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