Play For Today? An Attritional Interview With Richard Ayoade
By Richard Ayoade Chloë Clifton-Wright
Richard Ayoade’s arms are crossed. The faded sitcom star will remain in this quasi-foetal pose for the duration of our interview, an interview to which he has only agreed “under protest”. Supposedly, the panel show “regular” is meant to be talking to me about his book, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a somewhat breathless biography of the little-remembered dramatist. Does he appreciate the irony, I gently prod, that he is seeking to promote a biography of another man who is difficult to interview?
“Oh, Hughes wasn’t against interviews,” he says, the nasal bleat even more shrill without the compression of broadcast television. “Hughes would talk and talk. He just refused to explain himself.” Whereas Ayoade seems little more than an inconsequential collection of borrowed tics and insincere self-effacement, the playwright to whom he refers was all gravitas, depth and mystery. Hughes’s first play, Platform, a verbal dance between a beatnik and a bourgeois, debuted in 1960, but it was his television series The Harauld Hughes Half Hour Play (1965) that made him a household name.
I ask Ayoade if he has long been an admirer. “Well,” he says, managing to make even that single syllable a sedative, “since I was 14 or so.” Because I was clearly asking him whether he started engaging with absurdist post-modernism at primary school. In a sickening passage of auto-hagiography, Ayoade recalls his first encounter with the work of Hughes in the opening chapter of The Unfinished Harauld Hughes:
I was panning for classics in a second-hand bookshop when I looked up to see the stress-pinked eyes of the bookshop owner, Keith, a piece of white chocolate softening in his ghostly hands.
“You have a double,” he said.
This used to happen often. People would say I reminded them of someone they knew. What they tended to mean was that they had once met another person whom they couldn’t confidently categorise in terms of ethnicity — a variation on “Where are you from, originally?”
I said either “Oh” or “Huh?” or “Right”, one of those barely communicative cul-de-sacs designed to bring conversation to a close, but Keith persisted.
“Look under ‘H’,” he said. “‘H’ for Hughes.”
I held up a copy of “Birthday Letters”.
“Not that windswept bastard. Harauld. H. A. R. A. U. L. D. The mother was Welsh.”
I found the name on a spine. “Harauld Hughes: The Two-Hander Trilogy”.
“Look on the back,” Keith said.
I looked. I saw the author’s picture.
I had a double. Even in profile, the resemblance was remarkable. It was me.
It seems fitting that Ayoade’s biography, framed as a“quest” to discover the “real” Harauld Hughes (did anyone go on a quest to find the “unreal”?) reads less as inquiry, and more as a wallow in his own filth. Even a turgid would-be stylist like Ayoade (sleep easy, Nabakov, your crown is unclaimed) is unable to rob the story of Hughes of all readability, though. His is a fascinating tale. The child of an “oft-lapsed” nun and an unknown Nigerian, Harauld Hughes was raised in Elephant and Castle by Clifton “Monkey” Perch, a former flame of Hughes’s mother and father of their twin boys (and therefore Hughes’s half-brothers), Mickie and Colin. Hughes discovered his gift for dialogue and began to write a raft of potent, brutal plays in which wounded men prowl the stage, spouting invective and double talk. He should be remembered alongside Beckett, Pinter and Osborne. “Why isn’t he?” I ask.
When in doubt, Ayoade reaches for a reference, as if being a stammering quotebox for the aphorisms of others amounts to a personality. “Orson Welles said posterity is vulgar,” he screeches. “You never quite know who will be remembered by history.”
“Do you think you will be remembered by history?”I ask him.
“I hope not,” he lies. “In any case, I don’t think I need worry.” He’s right, it is we who need worry.
“So do you feel it’s just bad luck — that Hughes could have as easily entered the pantheon as — say — James Joyce or Virginia Woolf ?”
“I think Hughes may have been a victim of his own concision,” Ayoade offers.
Ah yes, how many brave men have we lost to concision? On he drizzles...
“Hughes only wrote one play, Dependence, that came anywhere close to being full-length.” Ayoade saying “full-length” causes me to dry heave. He doesn’t notice.
“Many of his other works are barely 15 minutes, especially if performed at a clip, so they’re hard to programme. I think that’s why they haven’t entered the repertoire.”
But surely, they could be bundled into one large piece— say an evening of three of his works.
“They used to do that more often. As I mentioned,” he says with the lack of grace that seems to be his stock in trade, “the first of his plays I read was a volume called The Two-Hander Trilogy.” If you want me to remember what you say, try being less forgettable.
“Did you change your views on Harauld Hughes during the writing of your book?”
“Well, I didn’t really have a view about him before...”
Oh. My. God.
“He’s a brilliant writer — he has his flaws of course — but I feel the real reason Hughes has disappeared is that he stopped publishing. His last play was in 1972, his last screenplay was only a few years after that, and that film fell apart.”
The face of whoever will hire him is talking about the film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, one of the more notorious “lost” films in British cinema history, and a central strand in Ayoade’s book. Bedlam was to be directed by Leslie Francis, the man behind the film And...?! (1969), which won the award for most innovatively punctuated film at the Berlinale. The shoot apparently ended in a full physical fight between Hughes and his half-brother Mickie Perch (its producer), culminating in an escape by helicopter.
“And of course, Hughes met Lady Virginia...”
Ayoade slows, sensing difficult territory, or perhaps he’s having a sugar crash after his second hot chocolate. “I think he didn’t feel the same need for global validation.” Maybe next time, Ayoade, counterfeiting balance, could write something similarly patronising about the countless women artists made mute by egomaniacal husbands.
Hughes’s widow, Lady Virginia Lovilocke, has not responded with what could be called enthusiasm to Ayoade’s biography, terming it “the worst kind of populist drivel”.
Does her assessment sting?
“I’m just pleased she thinks it could be popular,” Ayoade quips. Perhaps, one day, history will prove them both wrong, vulgar as that verdict might seem.
WHERE TO START WITH HARAULD HUGHES: SIX OF THE BEST
PLAYS
THE EARLY ONE: PLATFORM (1960)
An actress, on a railway platform at night, sees her bourgeois assumptions shattered when she encounters a straight-talking rocker.
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE LATE WORK: DEPENDENCE (1972)
In a post-apocalyptic world, only publishers remain. But what is there to publish? Wins the Evening Standard Award for the Year’s Longest Play in Proportion to Its Script. The Times describes it as“more pause than play” and “spectacularly hermetic”.
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
FILMS
THE EARLY ONE:
THE ESPECIALLY WAYWARD GIRL (1967)
A rebellious girl is sent to a reform school that has a hidden secret: the pupils are addicted to human blood (otherwise it’sa relatively good school)! Find it in “The Models Trilogy” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE LATE MASTERPIECE: THE DEADLY GUST (1973)When a glamorous female novelist travels to a notoriously windy island, she finds herself battling gusts both external and internal. Find it in “Four Films” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE POEM
“THE BREAKDOWN”
With its haunting opening couplet:
Have you broken down?
(I have broken down.)
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE PIECE
Hughes’s legendary acceptance address on receiving the 1986 Euripides Prize for Short Form Drama, in which he tells us, during a speech, that his plays must speak for themselves. Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber ○
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade is out now. This fictional work appears in the Autumn 2024 issue of Esquire, subscribe here.
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