“If it isn’t real, does it matter; if it doesn’t matter, is it real?” repeats Olly Hawes as his character’s pretentious nice guy act crumbles and the show takes a very dark turn.
But let’s rewind to the beginning of this hour-long, one-man show. The audience are presented with an empty stage bar a mic stand, while "Tequila" and "Fit But You Know It" are pumped through the sound system. There’s an expectant air as Olly Hawes sees to his own tech needs before sauntering onto the stage—this feels like the start of a stand-up set, and the people at the front look worried.
This slight frisson of danger continues throughout the show with the audience comfortably uncomfortable, at times lulled into laughter through comedy, at others shifting in their seats and emitting nervous chuckles. It becomes clear very quickly that the aim of this piece of storytelling is to provoke the audience rather than simply entertain them.
And provoke them he does by portraying a character that may or may not be based on himself or might simply match the demographic of straight, white, middle-class man. He teases at the beginning that it’s another piece of theatre written by this demographic, and so sets the hyper-self-aware tone for the rest of the performance.
Initially, this character is comedic, paralysed by choice, picking from his sock drawer while his inner monologue berates him about climate change. Later, he’s ironically at a stag do, telling himself that being aware that he’s performatively acting out what society expects from men somehow makes his questionable behaviour okay. Cue aggressively confronting an audience member, an excellently overblown, cocaine-fuelled conversation in a men’s toilet and the obligatory dance floor takeover.
Hawes frequently breaks character to spell out the hypocrisy to the audience with mixed effect, slipping in and out of his persona with ease but sometimes stepping on his own gags in the process.
This lightness of tone with an undercurrent of bleakness is later entirely flipped as he enters a future situation full of risk, despair and danger. His character becomes a poverty tourist, a realisation that prompts self-loathing, indignation and disbelief. What do we think of him now, he asks? Aren’t we all guilty of ignoring situations that don’t visibly impact us?
As a storyteller, Hawes is magnificent, keeping the audience completely on their toes and holding tight reins on the pace and tone of the piece. There’s a serious message here, but how its delivery is received is for the individual to decide—is it the play itself or simply the character within that are self-indulgent? Do the layers of comedy add to the impact of the message or is it just another piece of theatre that asks challenging questions to be edgy and relevant?
Personally, I lean to the latter: the frequent interjections to make it all very meta and consciously clever removed me too far from the story to connect with it fully—but perhaps that distance was always the aim...