“A stage fight went wrong, and I ended up with a knife embedded 8 cm into my spine. My leg went numb. Later, doctors told me the knife missed my aorta by millimetres, and it was written about in a medical journal (article title: A hit! A palpable hit!).”
WHO: Olly HAWES
WHAT: “A show about socks and sex and loving someone even though they’re quite annoying, and buying tat on holiday, and fear of death, and cognitive dissonance, and whether or not it’s an issue that you’re watching the world burn and all you can do is try to find meaning in the dancing of the flames, and also is it even possible to be a good man? Olly returns to the Fringe with a one-man, rollercoaster show that cuts to the core of modern masculinity. ‘A performer sure to find greatness’ (AYoungerTheatre.com).”
WHERE: Pleasance Courtyard – Bunker Two (Venue 33)
WHEN: 12:20 (60 min)
MORE: Click Here!
Is this your first time to Edinburgh?
No! The Fringe has been the site of some of the most happy, traumatic and farcical moments of my life.
I used to come every year as a teenager – I couldn’t get enough. It felt like my yearly top up of happiness. I learned about the diversity and brilliance and power of the arts. I also fell in love there for the first time. Under the rain and drizzle, in the middle of the Royal Mile, I put my arms around a girl and felt absurdly light and happy.
Then I went to Edinburgh in a play with my uni. It was a play that had lots of knives. A stage fight went wrong, and I ended up with a knife embedded 8 cm into my spine. My leg went numb. Later, doctors told me the knife missed my aorta by millimetres, and it was written about in a medical journal (article title: A hit! A palpable hit!). When I go past the venue where it happened, I still shudder. Somewhat hilariously, when it happened, the police showed up way before the ambulance.
The next time I took a show, it was a solo show – my first – and it was in a portacabin that only fit 10 people – so I did two shows a day. The thing is, the show featured me giving myself a coffee enema (it was during a more experimental stage of my life), so twice a day, every day, for 25 days, I gave myself a coffee enema, in front of a handful of people. I stank of coffee until the end of September. The Fest review opened with ‘Two enemas a day, every day, for 25 days, Olly Hawes might not have thought this through’. And yet, it was a kind of brilliant show about love and the universe – people still talk to me about it.
Now I’m back, and there are no enemas or knives in this show, promise.
What are the big things you’ve learned since 2023 and have you absorbed any of the lessons yet?
HAHAHAHHAHHAAAHA. What have I learned in the last year!? Um, nothing? I think my psychological metaworld is essentially an ongoing seesaw of working out what not to give a fuck about and what to care deeply about, and how not to go insane in the process. I guess I’ve learned to do that a bit better in the last year. Or maybe I’ve got worse at it. I DON’T KNOW OKAY JUST LEAVE ME ALONE.
Tell us about your show.
RIGHT. It’s made by ME and ME alone! But obviously no man is an island (John Donne, pg46), so there have been lots of people in my life who have supported me along the way, but, in an act of life possibly imitating art, I’m not going to mention them here.
Instead I’ll tell you about show’s journey so far:
I don’t know about you, but increasingly I look at the world and I have no idea whether to laugh until my sides split or cry until I’m dead, or just quietly try to make the things that I actually have influence over better. And I particularly don’t know how to do that given that I am a part of the probably most privileged demographic on the planet. Hooray, hooray for me. So the show is about someone trying to make a change, trying to make a change and trying to work out how to make the world a better place. And it does this by drawing a parallel between the state of modern man and the state of the world: everyone, the party is over and we have to make a change. Seriously, loads of bad stuff will happen if we don’t make a lot of big changes, really soon. We can all agree on that, right?
Something happened to me literally two days ago that I think says something about the spirit of the show: a friend of mine was sitting in my kitchen on a stool, looking into the mid-distance, just sort of shaking his head. He was kind of grey in the face. He’d just come back from a stag do, and he was just saying, ‘I just can’t, I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t do it anymore’ and I was like, ‘yeah man, you can’t do it anymore’. I kind of feel like we’re in that place with the state of the world: The party is over. We’ve got to make a change and if we don’t things are going to get really, really bad.
So the show’s about a man trying to change, and finding that hard. For the fans of cultural materialism, it’s a critique of late capitalism or post-capitalism or whatever you want to call it. For the fans of dystopian stories it’s an enquiry into the climate crisis and into the refugee crises. But it’s also about the little things in life. It’s about how we agonise over what socks we should wear in the morning or how acceptable it is to flirt with someone who’s not your partner.
So I suppose in a way I feel like it’s almost like a quintessential Fringe show: it’s massively ambitious, it’s about everything, but it’s just one man on stage, pretending he knows what the fuck he’s doing.
What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?
Theatre: After The Levoyah
Okay, I’m biassed – Nick, the writer of this show, and I run a storytelling company together, and have done so for 10 years. But the thing is, Nick is barely tolerable most of the time, he’s insanely grumpy, refuses to back down in arguments, and I think he might be trying to slowly poison me… and yet I’ve stuck with him for ten years. Why? Because he is the most brilliant writer, maker, storyteller, whatever. He is the most brilliantly silly and serious artist. The concept of After The Levoyah alone is so outrageous you should go, I’ve seen early versions, it’s going to be wild.
Comedy: Simple Town
You know when you first watched Stewart Lee and you were like ‘what the fuck is this guy going on about – is it innovation or a mistake?’ Well, whilst Simple Town are nothing like Stewart Lee, I think their brand of comedy is just as innovative. On instagram they’re amazing – they’re from New York, and I’ve never seen them live, so they might be shit on stage, but there’s no way I’m not going to see them.
Poetry: John Hegley – Do Horses Have Teeth, Sir
The author of my favourite quick poem that’s about potatoes (The spud sped.), John Hegley was a part of my childhood, teenage years and adulthood. He must be older than Moses now, so help the aged by going to see his show. He writes about love and life in a way that makes me cackle and cry.
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