Writer-Performer Olly Hawes on Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Failure – ahead of Old Fat F**k Up at Riverside Studios
In this opinion piece, writer-performer Olly Hawes reflects on why so many artists are turning to autofiction and confessional solo work — not out of ego, but economic necessity. As his new one-man show Old Fat F**k Up heads to Riverside Studios, Hawes considers the financial precarity shaping millennial adulthood, the collapse of support systems for emerging theatre-makers, and why mining one’s own life has become both a creative strategy and a survival mechanism.
‘LOOK AT US, MATE! WE’RE FINANCIAL INCELS! WE’RE FINANCIAL CUCKS THE PAIR OF US!’
I wrote these words. I am also going to say them — or shout them — most nights between now and Christmas. It’s what the ‘hero’ (if you can call him that) of my new storytelling show shouts at the top of his voice while standing at a urinal. In fact, he doesn’t shout it; he imagines he shouts it. He imagines plenty. He’s a bloke who’s a bit down on his luck, and finds that one of the ways to cope is to imagine that he’s not. But more about him later.
The show, Old Fat F**k Up, is about that stage of life a lot of millennials find themselves in — where you see your naked body in the mirror and want to cry, where you realise your career potentially resembles a slowly developing catastrophic car crash, and then discover that all of a sudden everything costs a bomb. And now you have kids as well, so there’s that. Hilarious, right?
The show is funny, but also dark; tender, but fairly rough in places. In it, I’m trying to explore the link between the consequences of living in a decaying society — one lacking vision or hope for a better future — and what that does to men’s capacity to look after themselves, others, and the next generation. Yes, the show is about men, but really it is about anyone who’s ever felt like they’re running out of road, trying to hold everything together while pretending they’re fine. The story of making the show, I think, also says something about the UK today.
What I’m about to do is probably stupid. I’m about to criticise someone. Not just anyone, but a critic who’s been publicly very kind about me. I’m about to (sort of) criticise Fergus Morgan.
Fergus is a terrific journalist writing about theatre. Last year, he picked my show, F**king Legend, as one of his Top 10 at the Edinburgh Fringe, wrote a glowing review in The Scotsman, and then interviewed me ahead of its London transfer to Riverside Studios. But that same year, he also published a piece in The Stage titled “Why is the Edinburgh Fringe flooded with solo shows about awful experiences?”
To be clear, neither F**king Legend nor Old Fat F**k Up are ‘about awful experiences’, so his article wasn’t aimed at me. And honestly, I get it. Anyone who’s spent time on the Fringe circuit since Covid gets it. There is undoubtedly a lot of lazy work that is essentially made on the premise that ‘my struggle MUST be heard’. But the scene is overflowing with solo work because, really, it’s the only kind most of us can still afford to make. Funding has evaporated. The networks that used to prop up independent artists — the scratch nights, the half-price rehearsal spaces, the friends-of-a-friend warehouse slots — are gone. So yes, people make one-person shows. And yes, a lot of them are about awful experiences. Imagine!
I, as it happens, love making what I call experimental storytelling shows. When you are limited to just one person and no set, in some ways there are no limits to what you can do, to the story you can tell. Old Fat F**k Up asks the audience to imagine a lot happening on stage — which, apart from me, is only occupied by a microphone. But it’s lucky I feel this way, because, really, I can’t afford to make any other type of theatre.
I imagine that a lot of people who see the show will think the main character is me. I like to write characters that feel very similar to me because it creates a frisson of excitement as a theatrical spectacle. It makes people sit on the edge of their seats. An audience will ask: ‘is just enough of this story fictionalised to make it an acceptable work of art exploring some of the issues with modern masculinity?’ That’s the theory anyway.
It’s one of the things that makes the genre of writing known as autofiction — writing that deliberately blurs the boundaries between the writer’s own life and the characters they write about — so compelling. Some of autofiction’s greatest exponents are my favourite writers: novelists Ben Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgård, Chris Kraus; theatre makers Chris Thorpe and Tim Crouch. But, again, it’s lucky I feel this way, because, again, I can’t afford to make any other type of theatre.
Even those critiques that acknowledge the autofictional necessity artists find themselves in tend to make the symptoms, rather than the causes, the headline. Autofiction, the confessional monologue, the ‘me-show’ — whatever you want to call it — isn’t a narcissistic trend (well, maybe in some cases it is), but it’s also an adaptation, a coping mechanism. It’s what happens when artists are priced out of collaboration, rehearsal space, and any form of production that involves more than one wage. So we start mining the only thing left that’s both accessible and inexhaustible: ourselves. My own face, my own finances, my own fuck-ups — that’s the set, the cast, the script.
The trouble is, once you start writing about yourself, life has a habit of calling your bluff. You write about a man whose finances are collapsing and then — surprise — your own start to wobble. You write about humiliation, and then life gives you fresh material. Autofiction becomes less a choice and more a trapdoor. When the boundary between art and life gets too thin, art bleeds into life, life bleeds into art — and sometimes that means audiences and critics are put in the position of feeling like they’re there to apply a plaster.
And just to be clear, I don’t think it should feel this way. When done right, shows like this should — I think — teeter on the edge; they should feel alive enough that audiences don’t see theatre as just a thing to do when there’s nothing on Netflix, but as a unique cultural experience. Where else can you experience a story that is unmediated by screens, uncorrupted by product placement, not manipulated into your awareness by some algorithm? Where else can you experience a story that is a visceral, guttural, communal exploration of the human condition?
I hope, therefore, that one day we will look back and not see the solo show as a symptom of a society in decay, but as a pathway that helped us towards a different theatre culture — better adapted to our times, and one that remembered what theatre is actually for. Not spectacle, not profit, not moral instruction — but communion. A place where someone stands in front of a group of strangers and says: This is what it feels like to be alive right now. If we can keep doing that — honestly, urgently, however cheaply — then maybe all this financial precarity and self-exposure won’t have been a dead end, but the start of something new.
Old Fat F**k Up will be at Riverside Studios over 25 performances from 5–20 November. Ticket link HERE.
