Guest Blog: 'I Don’t Think You Have Seen This Before': Writer and Director Titus Halder On The World Premiere Of His New Play, FOAL

No-one can imagine that the way Larry LaLonde plays guitar is the right way to play guitar. It’s weird. It’s maverick. It’s unique. When I first heard Primus, I had no idea what I was listening to, but in my teenage bedroom on the Isle of Wight, it shook my bones. I wanted to be Les Claypool and find my Larry LaLonde. On the face of it, the slapping-tapping madness of Jerry Was a Racecar Driver is a manic song about a racing driver; at the end of it, the driver dies in a crash “wrapped […] around a telephone pole”. Dig into the Primus catalogue, and you find these endless evocative tales of murky depraved worlds like My Name is Mud, in which the unhinged titular character murders a guy with an aluminium bat.

I never thought once thought about what the songs were about when I was a kid, I was just trying to learn the basslines – but now, with a few brain cells more, listening to the lyrics, the thematics of these songs are revealed as lurid, dark, satirical, political. It’s just that the music rocks hard and is funky as hell. And I think it’s in this spirit that I wrote the heavy metal arthouse mayhem that is FOAL.

Primus is one of the defining bands of the 1990s/2000s. FOAL is a love letter to that period. Growing up on the Island in that era, as does A.K., the (only) character in FOAL, there is one other crucial piece of context. If you’re ever on the Island and you want a mint choc chip ice cream, there can only be one real choice; Minghella’s. And if the name is familiar beyond regional-specific ice cream purveyors, then yes, Anthony Minghella, one of the greatest modern film directors, heralds from that same ice-cream dynasty.

The English Patient came out in 1996, when I was 9 years old. It was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, and won 9. It all meant that it was possible to grow up on the Island and dream that one day you could be a Hollywood movie director. I fell in love with classic (read: trashy) Hollywood movies, and it is also in this world of movies that FOAL lives. Probably none moreso than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in which alienated Travis Bickle turns homicidal vigilante, hoping for a cleansing rain to come to rid society of its ills. I wanted to write a part like that for an actor; dangerous, mercurial, morally ambiguous. And so in FOAL, a murky, neo-noir, thriller, we get to a kind of Taxi Driver set on the Isle of Wight in the 1990s/2000s.

Meeting Amar [Chadha-Patel, who plays AK in FOAL] was electric. He talked about how he was drawn to the weird in FOAL. I think I may have found my Larry LaLalonde. Amar’s skill and qualities are maverick. It is a special performance. It is unique. I don’t think you have seen this before. We geek out about music in rehearsals.

Amar instantly understood the world of FOAL, saying he’d been listening to Nine Inch Nails The Fragile as inspiration for the part; an album which I had on repeat whilst writing the play, along with The Downward Spiral. NIN looms large for me over (under?) the play. I am always astonished that that album, with all its dark notes, questioning, and anguish, also contains one of the funkiest grimiest songs ever put down on tape, Closer. I hope we capture some of that spirit.

FOAL runs at the Finborough Theatre from 5-30 May