The Unfinished Harauld Hughes

by Ayoade, Richard | Film theory & criticism
Published 03/10/2024 by FABER & FABER in the United Kingdom
Hardback | 192 pages
224 x 143 x 23mm | 308g

'So funny -- Nabokov meets Spinal Tap.' - Stephen Merchant

'Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.' - Tim Key

'Absolutely miraculous.' - Jesse Eisenberg

'A brain-swirlingly funny quest.' - Robert Popper

Richard Ayoade's fictional quest to rescue Harauld Hughes - the almost mythical mid-century playwright - from obscurity.

The gifted filmmaker, corduroy activist and amateur dentist, Richard Ayoade, first chanced upon a copy of The Two-Hander Trilogy by Harauld Hughes in a second-hand bookshop. At first startled by his uncanny resemblance to the author's photo, he opened the volume and was electrified. Terse, aggressive, and elliptical, what was true of Ayoade was also true of Hughes's writing, which encompassed stage, screen, and some of the shortest poems ever published.

Ayoade embarked on a documentary, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, to understand the unfathomable collapse of Hughes's final film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, taking us deep inside the most furious British writer since the Boer War.

This is the story of the story of that quest.