It’s all a joke…or is it? Olly Hawes discusses his theatre show ‘F**king Legend’

Olly Hawes is a dynamic theatre maker whose latest show, F**king Legend, explores the nuances of modern masculinity and societal contradictions as well as socks, sex and holiday tat. 

Opening at London’s Riverside Studios on 13th November,  F**king Legend defies simple categorisation and bravely blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction. In this interview, Olly opens up about his creative process and the inspirations behind his work, inviting audiences to engage with his art on their own terms.

How would you describe your show F**king Legend?

Yes, this would be a good place to start! Permit me, if you will, to be particularly hifalutin straight off the bat. The show is very deliberately formed to make it hard to define. (Don’t you just love it when artists say stuff like this?)

In some ways it’s a very simple story about a man, struggling to make a change. In other ways it's a coruscating attack on an apathetic society sleepwalking into self-immolation.

In some ways it's a very simple performance - it's just a man on stage telling the story. In other ways, it’s very unclear who this man is. Is he an actor performing a role? Is it the writer making a confession? Or a narrator weaving a series of complex layers of metanarratives?

Is it all a joke, or should we take it seriously? The show is trashy, but intellectual; silly, but serious - because I feel to properly respond to the world right now, it has to be. 

How do you manage to strike the balance between humour and profound social critique?

F**k me, I don’t know! Okay, well, I think in many ways the role of an artist, a maker, is to create a reflection or a refraction of the world, right? And the world we currently live in - the one I occupy anyway - is constantly battering me with absurd moments that clash with each other entirely. 

Let’s take the topic of food and shelter, how do we experience these most fundamental of notions? Well, the other day, within the same minute, I found myself marvelling at the truly stunning array of sourdough breads on sale in my local shop (there were 8 types), then left to be told by a homeless person he would kill himself if I didn’t give him £26. So many of my friends can’t afford to buy houses yet have access to streaming services that means they could watch a different home renovation tv show all day every day all year. We experience the world as a series of non-sequiturs, and to get through the day we all have to employ a considerable degree of cognitive dissonance.

I was brought up on satire - The Day Today, Brass Eye - but those shows wouldn’t work today, the world itself is too satirical, so we need something else, more personal but also more kaleidoscopic. 

You’ve previously said that the show picks apart modern masculinity and draws parallels between the state of men, and the state of the world. What do you see as the most damaging elements of toxic humanity and masculinity today, and are they played out in F**king Legend?

There’s a line in the show: ‘It’s harming you, harming those around you, harming those who will inherit what you leave behind’. The tragedy of toxic behaviour is how much it affects other people, how it gets repeated, how it roots itself through society so much that it becomes normal. So, there’s that, and then there’s how we deal with it: it feels like we’re getting better at identifying the problems, but not so much at solving them. As a consequence, we collectively feel stuck, frustrated, disempowered. It’s the pervasiveness and this inability to properly change things that the show deals with.

What was the process of creating a ‘trashy but intellectual’ and ‘silly but serious’ one-man show like?

Well, I’m not sure how far behind the curtain I should reveal… but here goes. The last show I made upset quite a lot of people, and I was scared and shamed enough by that experience to have given up on making theatre. I was bereft, heartbroken and I felt a failure, but eventually I found peace with it. But, what is it they say? It’s only when you’ve really let go that you can find yourself - or something like that? I found I had this itch that I couldn’t help but scratch, and the idea for this show kept growing in my head, so in amongst all the other work and stuff that was now filling my life, I started to squeeze a couple of hours a week here and there. I asked my friend, the writer Tim Cowbury, to send me a text at a certain time each week, to keep me disciplined. And ever so slowly, F**king Legend, this trashy but intellectual, silly but serious show emerged.

What message do you hope audiences take away from F**king Legend?

I don’t really work like that! I’ve created a show, I chose to make it about certain things and perform it in a certain way. I want people to meet it on their own terms, to creatively engage with it, and have their own thoughts and feelings. It is - if you’ll permit me to finish in the same vein I started and be hifalutin for a moment - a work of art to be experienced, not a lesson I’m trying to teach anyone. 

Olly Hawes: F**King Legend is at the Riverside Studios, London between Wednesday 13th November to Saturday 21st December. For tickets, visit: https://riversidestudios.co.uk/see-and-do/fking-legend-136800/