Now F**king What? (A Riverside R&D Sharing)

A new show in development by Olly Hawes, creator of F**king Legend and Old Fat F**k Up.

You were told things would get better.

You were told you could be anything you wanted.

You were told that if you worked hard, found someone to love and tried not to be too much of a dick, everything would probably be okay.

And for a while, you believed it.

Now F**king What? is a blisteringly funny, painfully honest new solo show about growing up, falling in love and discovering that the future you were promised may never have existed.

A man returns home and receives devastating news, pulling him back into the story of his first great love: the obsession, the humiliation, the impossible intensity of wanting another person to make you whole. What begins as a teenage romance becomes an investigation into memory, friendship and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

Set against a lifetime of broken promises - from 9/11 and the financial crash to social media, Brexit, pandemic and climate collapse - Now F**king What? asks what happens when an entire generation reaches adulthood and realises that nobody knows what happens next.

Can love save you? Can friendship? Can having children? Can politics? Can anything?

Or do you just keep saying, “Everything will be okay,” until it either becomes true or loses all meaning?

This special R&D sharing offers audiences the chance to see the show at an early stage of its development and help shape what it becomes. Expect new material, unfinished ideas, theatrical experiments and, quite possibly, some of the more outrageous bits that will be cut before anyone sensible gets to see them.

Audience feedback will form part of the development process.

Tickets are strictly limited.

Olly Hawes is a writer, performer and theatre-maker known for exhilarating solo shows that combine fearless storytelling, savage humour and moments of startling vulnerability. His work pulls audiences into apparently chaotic, deeply controlled performances that are playful and dangerous, trashy but intellectual, silly but serious. Critics have described him as “a magnificent storyteller” and “one of Britain’s most daring theatrical storytellers.”