Olly Hawes Explores Masculinity, Mortality and Modern Malaise in Old Fat Fk Up at Riverside Studios

Writer and performer Olly Hawes returns to Riverside Studios this November with his new show Old Fat F**k Up, a follow-up to last year’s F**king Legend. The production examines middle age, fatherhood and masculinity in contemporary Britain, asking what it means to hold things together when life doesn’t go to plan.

Tell us a bit about Old Fat F**k Up

It’s funny! It’s unexpectedly tender! It’s a searingly honest exploration of the crisis of masculinity! It’s a show about seeing your naked body in the mirror and crying, discovering your career’s uncontrollably disintegrating, and realising that suddenly everything costs a bomb. Oh, and now you’ve got kids too, so there’s that. Hilarious, right? It’s kind of like a sort of masculine Fleabag meets Fight Club, but with parenthood thrown into the mix. I’m sure it’ll wind a few people up, probably in all the right ways. I’m not chasing correctness; I’m chasing honesty. I’m trying to capture a feeling I think a lot of us know deep down but rarely admit to.

How much of the story is taken from your own life?

I love writing from my own life, because (as a potential narcissist) there’s nothing else I know as intimately, so it’s such rich material to exploit. And I get to decide how much I beat myself up, or how kind I am to myself, I tend towards the former. In terms of exactly how much of the story is taken from my own life, it’s one of the questions the story of the show hinges on, so I’m not going to say, but the answer is revealed in the show itself. In some ways it’s based on the truth in that it’s based on things that have happened in my life, in other ways it’s based on the truth in that it’s based on my greatest fears.

And it’s one of the questions that’s kind of at the heart of the show. How much of this is true? Is this guy actually for real? As a result, I’m not going to say exactly how much, but the answer is revealed in the show itself.

Why do you think so many people in their late 30s and 40s feel like they haven’t achieved what they hoped to?

Ha ha ha. Well, I think the answer, in one way, is pretty obvious, right? They feel like they haven’t achieved what they hoped to, because they haven’t achieved what they hoped to. But that’s true of everyone, so maybe this is more about how we as individuals and a society view failure. We all fail, all the time, every day, in massive ways and tiny ways, and in many ways that’s great. Every success is built on a succession of failures. I certainly haven’t achieved what I hoped I would, but I’m kind of fine with that. (Honestly. HONESTLY). But I’m also probably both happier and steadier in middle age than I ever have been at any other time in my life, and I think that’s a great achievement. Would I trade that emotional maturity to achieve just one of my childhood dreams? Probably. But maybe the trick of middle age is learning to want better things.

I think we get into a grey area when our privileges intersect with our pain. That’s where it gets messy. I think a lot of middle-aged men are walking contradictions: lucky and lost, comfortable and completely stuck.

The show deals with anger, guilt and love. How do you balance the serious parts with humour?

There’s a section that still makes me wince every time I run it. I’m still not sure how that moment’s gonna land. I think it’s funny, but I think some people really won’t. But the two are so closely connected, right? Who hasn’t cried at a wedding or laughed at a funeral? Who hasn’t looked at the state of the world and not been sure whether to laugh or cry? And I think so many people’s lives are becoming more and more like this. There’s more money than there ever has been in our economy, yet our society is almost as unequal as it’s ever been. And that means people are suffering, people are experiencing hardship, and it’s hard to say that we’re going in the right direction. The gall of the elites who have engineered this makes me want to laugh, the fact that the rest of us have allowed it to happen makes me want to cry. And if you don’t want to cry about it, you have to laugh about it, right?

How does this new show connect to your last one, Fking Legend?

Intimately. Fking Legend definitely spawned Old Fat Fk Up. One isn’t a sequel to the other or anything like that, but they’re thematically linked, stylistically linked, and the new show is an evolution of the old one. I’m really happy that Fking Legend is coming back for a short run and people can see both shows on the same night or as part of the same run. I feel like that will be a bit like listening to different albums by the same artist. You know it’s the same voice, but it’s resonating in a different way. I think that voice speaks beyond men, actually. It’s about anyone juggling expectation and exhaustion, trying to make sense of the world when it keeps shifting under your feet.

You used AI to help write the show. How did that work in practice?

I’m pretty sure that we’re living in a simulation, and the simulation keeps trying to give us bigger and bigger hints that that’s what’s happening, and we keep ignoring them. So, yeah, I used AI to help write the show, because I am an AI, and so are you. Honestly, I used it a lot to get quick answers to questions, like it was a researcher. I recorded conversations with the director and dramaturg, then asked it to summarise those transcripts, and it was great for that. And, just to see what would happen, every now and then I asked it to write lines here and there. It was absolutely terrible at this.

What was the biggest challenge in putting Old Fat F**k Up together?

MONEY. THERE’S NO MONEY IN MAKING WORK LIKE THIS ANYMORE. But listen, that’s the cross I bear to give the people the benefit of seeing my art. I know, what a martyr. You’re welcome, universe.

Old Fat F**k will be at Riverside Studios over 25 performances from 5^th November – 20^th December. Ticket link HERE.