CROUCH Touch Pause Engage – a Rugby Union referee’s instruction to opposing teams at a scrum-down – is the story of Gareth “Alfie” Thomas, the flying, lying Welsh winger, and of his hometown of Bridgend too.

The lying Welsh winger? Well, at one point, one of the three men and three women who play Alfie in Robin Soans’s new play reaches into the dressing-room locker for his autobiography, reads a passage and dismisses every word as a lie. Gareth Thomas had “lied” to his team-mates, “lied” to his wife Jemsy, “lied” to the readers, because, as we know now, Gareth was gay.

Sportsmen in macho sports just didn’t come out, but as a scrum of a different kind, the media pack, closed in on him, ball-player Gareth did eventually play ball with the Daily Mail – ironically seen as a homophobic newspaper at the time – to tell his story. Others in other sports, but not yet a practising Premier League footballer, have followed suit.

And now Gareth’s tale is told on stage in bold-lettered, emphatic language, recounting how this captain of Wales had to live through the lie, to the point of contemplating suicide as his marriage and playing form crumbled.

Running parallel with his crossroads moment is the story of Bridgend schoolgirl Darcey (Lauren Roberts), whose combination of low self-esteem and the scorn of others has brought her to the same point.

Bridgend? Suicide? Wasn’t that the place where all those “weird, teenage suicide cult deaths” took place? Please note, however, that Darcey’s story is not connected to that “copycat craze”, more to the darkness that can enshroud anyone young and yet to have the tools to make sense of life when you feel like an outsider.

When you do have the tools, like Gareth, dealing with the attitudes of others is the prime issue. Hence the lying he used as his carapace. Sitting there as a journalist hearing of hacks hiding behind bushes, hunting their prey in packs, driving Gareth Thomas to the edge, was discomforting, even when knowing that “naming and shaming” still sells papers. Newspapers feed off prejudices, but you wish for a day when gay revelations were not the stuff of news.

Crouch Touch Pause Engage does a good job as a standard bearer for change with its air of defiance, its ruddy humour and its frankness, making prejudice look absurd. Fear, in its myriad forms, is the most cancerous of human emotions; defeat fear, however you confront it, and so much more can be achieved. That is why the best rugby is fearless, the best theatre, art, music and cinema is fearless, but all too often it takes an individual to break collective fear.

Gareth Thomas’s route has been troubled, sometimes desperate, threatening to destroy his raging, blazing talent, but his story, Soans’s searing play and the teamwork of Max Stafford-Clark’s cast are each in their own way a game-changer.

Crouch Touch Pause Engage, Out Of Joint/National Theatre of Wales/Arcola Theatre, on tour at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk