Desire Under the L Train is the stage adaptation of Chris Thompson's award-winning, international hit podcast 'Two Foreskins Walk into a Bar.'

Following its international success as a podcast, Chris adapted 'Two Foreskins Walk into a Bar' for stage and played a sell out, extended off-Broadway residency at the Kraine Theatre in New York City in 2023 and 2024. The play will be returning to the US, and made is making its UK premier under the title DESIRE UNDER THE L TRAIN at the Omnibus Theatre June 19th - 21st 2026.

Following a sold-out, extended Off-Broadway residency at New York’s Kraine Theatre, award-winning playwright and screenwriter Chris Thompson (Carthage, Albion, Of Kith and Kin) brings his outrageously funny and haunting solo show Desire Under the L Train to Omnibus Theatre for a strictly limited three-night engagement as part of the venue’s landmark 96 Festival.

The production is directed by Owen Horsley (Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, Diana: The Musical), Associate Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Associate Director of Cheek by Jowl.

With his ten-year relationship at an end and his career in freefall, British playwright Chris Thompson flees to New York City and throws himself into a no-limits odyssey of sex and connection.

That was the plan.

As desire spirals into something darker and more compulsive, he is forced to confront not just what he wants, but why he keeps wanting it.

It’s a journey of sex and survival that propels him into the shadowy corners of New York, past and present.

As he searches for connection in cruising grounds, art galleries and dive bars, he is haunted by the artists who came before him, and the ghost of every gay man in whose footsteps he walks.

Desire Under the L Train is a filthy, hilarious and devastatingly brutal reckoning with self-deception, collective memory and the limitations of our own desires.

Laying himself bare with striking vulnerability, Chris Thompson’s writing and performance push the theatrical self-portrait to its limit, leaving audiences entertained, deeply affected and – in their own words — “seen, adored and celebrated.

The play is adapted from Thompson’s hit podcast Two Foreskins Walk Into a Bar, which reached the iTunes Top 20 in 15 countries and won the “Highly Commended” prize at the British Independent Podcast Awards 2025.