Mark Bittlestone will probably be most familiar to you if your TikTok ‘for you page algorithm has served up his short-form sketches focused on his life as a gay man.
Here, Bittlestone delivers an hour of observational humour that expands on those slices of life to deliver a five-point guide to the gay experience.
Bittlestone is warm and witty, but there’s an edge to some of the material that reflects on the cruelty and persecution meted out to gay men in the UK not so long ago.
Interspersed with the more generalised moments, there’s some very personal material, and we learn the possibly surprising fact that Mark’s day job is teaching children.
Appearing in a be-dazzled England Football shirt, Mark is also aiming to challenge stereotypes. He enjoys sports, including football, and describes his struggle to reconcile the different parts of himself, and to challenge ideas of masculinity and acceptability.
Image Credit: Rebecca Need-Menear
He takes us through his five point guide to the gay experience, and talks about the challenges, and sometimes rewards, of each of those milestones.
Having dealt with his story of coming out, Mark quickly moves on to discuss his experiences on Grindr – where, he tells us, this show is advertised in his bio. It’s actually worked to attract at least some of this performance’s audience.
Whilst exploring one of the many tangents within this show, Mark discusses HIV and PrEP. There having been a huge public information campaign in the 1990s, when the AIDS crisis was at its height, knowledge has slipped in the intervening decades, and current research shows a worrying lack of basic knowledge about how HIV can be spread. It’s these moments of educational insight that elevate this production from mere Stand Upm into something more intriguing.
From STIs, we move onto Gay Clubbing, Building a Community, and Gay Dating. Mark has some self-deprecating tales, which demonstrate how the queer experience differs from the heterosexual one, and how misunderstandings arise.
There’s a very funny extended sequence surrounding an attempted first date, and a subsequent Grindr ‘third’, and how that evening goes spectacularly wrong.
The use of social media posts, projected onto a screen behind Mark, which has been a frequent feature throughout the performance, comes to the fore here, and gets its shining moment of glory in a spectacular finale that loops around to the beginning of the show.
Bittlestone is a warm and engaging comedian, even when delivering material that has an edge of hardness to it. This is not the Mark familiar from his social media videos, but is a development of that persona, albeit with more vulnerability mixed into the stories of how it feels to be looking for love when you’re also still trying to find yourself.
Mark Bittlestone: I Need A Straight Guy continues at the Pleasance Dome – Jack Dome (venue 23) at 21:40 (9.40pm) until 26th August (not 12th)
Featured Image Credit: Rebecca Need-Menear