F**king Legend at Pleasance Courtyard – Edinburgh Fringe review

Olly Hawes is a magnificent writer. He has a near-grating ability to tease out the latent, almost imperceptible hypocrisies that tick away underneath modern life. His newest solo play, F*cking Legend, encompasses everything from 21st century masculinity to despondent attitudes towards the refugee crisis.

The plot, when you write it out, feels fairly perfunctory: telling the tale of a jack-the-lad boyfriend who, whilst on a stag do abroad, cheats on his girlfriend with one of the locals. Then, fast-forward a few decades into a very foreseeable future, and the garish truths of the world catch up with him. The vibes are nothing short of vicious: it’d almost feel like something from Black Mirror if it didn’t all seem so inevitable.

Hawes performs solo within the intimate confines of a Pleasance Courtyard bunker, first emerging from his own sound desk, as if cornering us after we’ve taken our seats and preventing an exit. His manner is unrelentingly forward yet unassumingly chill: one moment he’s screaming expletives into an audience member’s face, the next he’s cackling about a previous remark. There’s nowhere to hide – but then why should anyone try and hide from the realities facing those around them, battling through suffering?

Submerged underneath layers upon ossified layers of near-insatiable irony and self-deprecation, there’s a near-uncontrollable sense of deep-seated fury that plays out here: our narrator swinging between indignation and nihilism. An incandescent rage at the sheer apathy the vast majority of the western world drapes over itself, like some well-worn and pock-marked linen.

For all of Hawes’ mastery of form, I expect I simply wanted a bit more of that rage to filter through, when in turn it simply seemed to fizzle out – some burning fire that just needed that extra puff of oxygen.