Seductive music, murderous reggae songs and sinister dance sequences form an ironic accompaniment to this gruelling, powerfully acted horror- show. It dramatises first-hand accounts of gay people attacked physically and verbally by mainly Muslim fundamentalists or their freelance, queer-bashing supporters, both of whom wish them dead. I was left feeling battered by the repetitive strain of 70 minutes of homophobic abuse, violence stylishly simulated in shadows or subdued lighting.

This form of one-note, verbatim theatre cries out for response or retaliation, for an antidote to all the anti-homosexualising. I kept wondering why Lloyd Newson, who created and directed the show for his DV8 Physical Theatre company, had not provided counter-weighting argument from parliamentarians, academics, doctors, even liberal religious figures. He could have given To Be Straight With You the life-blood of conflict and rescued it from stasis. The governing intention of Newson’s show seems to be to issue another alarm call about the way in which the limits of British tolerance are being stretched to danger point by these same fundamentalists. Muslims in particular are reckoned the chief threat, but Christians too. The recorded voice of Iris Robinson, wife of the Democratic Unionist leader, who in June generously conceded she did not want people “to thrash the living daylights out of a homosexual man or woman”, is heard spewing out homophobic abuse, while insisting it was Christian beliefs that drove her to such straits. And catchy dance hall and reggae music, deriving from that most Christian of countries, Jamaica, sounds repeated notes of menace with its visions of “stamping out gay men and putting them on fire”.

A grim humour intermittently alleviates the enveloping mood of menace. A gay Muslim teenager, one of nine brilliant dancer-actors, deploys a skipping-rope with breathtakingly rapid elegance as he makes light of his parents’ intolerance. An older gay man — women are mainly absent from the show — maintains that Islam is full of hypocritical married chaps who resemble English public schoolboys and who meet boyfriends in public baths. More typical, though, is the chilling moment when a Muslim preacher suggests that at best gay people should be driven out of Britain to live in some other country.

His remarks and his fury sounded reminiscent of Nazi leaders, who before the Final Solution suggested Madagascar or Palestine should take the spurned Jews of Europe. Is that what the fundamentalists want to agitate, Newson implicitly asks, a Homosexual Holocaust for which Muslims can freely argue in their places of worship?

The testimony of an Iraqi doctor, who seeks UK asylum describing how he was kicked in front of a jeering crowd while his male lover was taken away to be tortured and killed, may nudge you towards believing so. A frightening night.
Until 15 November. 020 7452 5000, www.nationaltheatre.org