Review: OLD FAT F**K UP, Riverside Studios

It’s the show I was born to review! 

An easy line, and not quite true in my, fortunate, case, but there’ll be plenty of men (and maybe even more women) who will look at that title, read the blurb, glance at the show handout and recognise something of their own life in the man who greets us in a blood-stained grey T-shirt with Lady Macbethish hands.

Olly Hawes strides up and down the thrust stage like a kind of inverse Miss World contestant, not simpering in furtherance of peace and the protection of animals, but snarling at the lot of an early middle-aged man struggling to navigate family life. He tells us early on - the show is a monologue with a mic, interspersed with a meta commentary delivered without the mic - that it’s not a stand-up show (though it does feel like an mid-1980s observational set at times) and, mercifully, that it’s also not a true story. He does muddy those waters at times, but it’s good to hear that this is no confession as it means we can still like the man as we condemn the character.

That’s because, as the trigger warnings and the blood suggests, the comedy turns dark at times and, across three cathartic events crammed into one long day, our anti-hero does, sees and imagines some bad things. Though there are moments when I’d like to turn the volume down, theatre’s equivalent of hiding behind the sofa, this is crisis of masculinity stuff, so we’re hardly likely to be skipping through Parliament Hill Fields whistling a happy tune now are we?

The smell test for shows like this comes in three parts: is it embedded in truth (it certainly doesn’t need to be ‘true’, an increasingly problematic concept these days); is it original in its insight; and is it funny?

Well, the travails of family life were always with us, but you would have to be blind not to see that the cost of living, in a low wage economy founded on insecure jobs, and the astronomical prices in estate agents’ windows make parenting so demanding that many are just not bothering any more. The case is slightly undermined by references to needing a bigger car - even with one on the way, a family should cope in all but tiniest of vehicles for a few years. But there’s a truth in the dilemmas presented here.

I confess, and I suspect as someone whose children are now in their mid to late 20s I’m a little outside the show’s target market, that I was disappointed in its absence of wholly new perspectives. It was no surprise to learn that men aren’t sure of their roles any more, especially those pulled between an embrace of Guardianista liberalism / feminism and the compensations of going down the pub with the lads. There’s also, due to the format as much as the material, more tell than show in the script, ideas that might emerge organically in conversations inevitably reported to us in speeches.

Was it funny? The hardest test of all! At times, it was, particularly in a flight of fancy involving a certain American politician, though, perhaps, not the one you’re thinking of. But, despite the cover of exaggeration and pantomimeish delivery, it’s still tough in 2025 to go full on with that kind of material for fear of the offence overwhelming the humour. That made for an interesting contrast with a taboo-breaking five minutes about halfway through the piece, in which I felt the temperature in the room drop.

Hawes can be a winning performer, a sad clown at times, with a bite of satire, but this is his second one-man show (his first, F**king Legend is running alongside Old Fat F**k Up at this venue) and maybe he’s outgrowing the limitations he has set himself. There’s almost certainly a more nuanced, funnier and less cautious two-hander that could grow from the character and situation he has conjured. And it would dilute the male gaze and male voice that, just like its female equivalent, can wear one down a little even over a brisk 70 minutes.

Old Fat F**k at Riverside Studios until 20 December