F**king Legend Review

F**king Legend Review

Until 21st December 2024

On Thursday evening, I would have defined a f**king legend as anyone who managed to get past bar two in the Glastonbury tickets queue or the kind lady who gave me directions to the theatre when I realised I’d left my phone at home. 

But listen, they’re not the only f**king legends in town because Olly Hawes is performing his aptly named one-man show at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith until the 21st of December. 

Yes, it may be the story of another English, middle-class, straight, cis male but this is not Live at The Apollo. This is a serious piece of art that cuts deep into the core of modern masculinity and the wretchedness of existence through the lens of life’s most mundane objects.

“Hawes gets this spot on with his exceptional attention to detail…”

Take a pair of socks, for example. They’re quite boring and usually inconsequential unless you’re wearing the wrong pair and you’re trying to break in new Doc Martens. But those socks can just as quickly become the socks you were wearing when you cheated on your girlfriend who you love even if she is quite annoying. 

Or the socks you were wearing when you bludgeoned a zombie to death with a baseball bat because apparently all culture is aimed at 15-year-old boys and that’s why men never properly grow up. 

When there is just one person in the cast, it can be very difficult to create the context in a way that the audience can visualise. Yet, Hawes gets this spot on with his exceptional attention to detail as the literal and metaphorical world around him goes up in flames. 

I couldn’t exactly blame the woman sitting in front of me for drinking from her hip flask as Hawes broke the fourth wall once again by plonking himself in the middle of the audience with a microphone and describing several types of sex scenes – pornographic and avant-garde included. 

These moments, which felt more like a conversation than a play, were powerful, engaging and thought-provoking in a way that was impossible to follow in the second half. 

As Hawes repeated: “Does it really matter if something isn’t real? Is something really real if it doesn’t matter?” and the chaotic energy of the previous 25 minutes climaxed, the audience was also left wondering what had just happened. But I think that may have been the point.

I haven’t seen a show like F**king Legend before and I’m confident I won’t see anything similar for quite some time, so if you like the sound of it, make sure you head to Riverside Studios before the 21st of December. 

If you don’t like the sound of it, then recommend it to an enemy instead. As Hawes so bluntly puts it on an A5 handout which was left on everybody’s chair, a ticket sold is a ticket sold. 

Maggie John

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