As he prepares to bring his new darkly funny and deeply personal play Old Fat F**k Up to Riverside Studios, writer and performer Olly Hawes reflects on what it means to stumble into middle age still waiting to feel like a proper grown-up. Blending stand-up, confession and theatre, the show follows an exhausted father buckling under financial and emotional pressure, haunted by the version of manhood he thought he’d grow into. In this piece, Hawes considers how a generation raised to believe adulthood would bring certainty instead finds itself improvising, faking it, and trying to pass for the real thing.
I use the phrase ‘grown up’ a lot.
‘Oh my god that’s so grown up’, ‘You’re acting like such a grown up’, ‘That’s the most grown up thing I’ve seen anyone do in ages’.
I’m 40 later this year. I have a mortgage, I have a wife, I have kids, I even have a car… and yet, I really don’t feel like a grown up – or rather, to add a vital stipulation – I do feel like a grown up, I just don’t feel how I thought I would feel as a grown up when I wasn’t a grown up. To put it more simply: my parents are proper grown ups, and they always have been; I am not a proper grown up, and I never will be.
I described myself as ‘middle aged’ the other day. My friend (who is three months younger than me) guffawed. When I pointed out that, numerically speaking, we are undoubtedly middle aged, she went into a long explanation that amounted to: the numbers say one thing, the feeling inside me says another.
I think we all know why this is. We are part of the first generation who – collectively speaking – will earn less than their parents. If you’re lucky enough to have a mortgage, you almost certainly got it because you got help from your parents – and if you don’t have a mortgage, it’s probably because you didn’t.
And so here we are – here I am: a lifelong customer of the bank of mum and dad, forever grateful for the generosity, forever frustrated to never be able to escape, wretchedly sad that I won’t be able to do the same for my kids. Guilty around my friends who don’t have the same support, and yet, somehow, financially emasculated – a financial incel, if you will.
So that’s the diagnosis – it’s one we’re all familiar with, but what about the consequences of the diagnosis? It’s a question that sits at the heart of my new show, Old Fat F**k Up.
Let me paint a picture.
The hero of the story – if we can call him that – is yearning for that stage of life that most of us know is probably never going to come: when life starts to feel secure, sorted – when you start to feel like a proper grown up. He’s dependent on his parents, on his partner, on the fantasy of adulthood that we were sold as kids. Every reminder that it’s never going to happen curdles into befuddlement, frustration and, ultimately, shame. The financial mess spawns an existential one e wants (at least, he thinks he wants) to feel like a grown-up, but he can’t.
And if he isn’t a proper grown up, then that means he’s not a proper man. He grew up being shown that being a man meant being capable, self-sufficient, in control, but he’s not really any of these things… so what’s left? The gap between the man he thought he’d become and the man he actually is.
And if he isn’t a proper grown up, and he isn’t a proper man, then he’s not a proper parent, either. Trying to raise kids while feeling half-raised yourself is a special kind of madness. The exhaustion, the guilt, the pressure to be both gentle and firm, strong and soft, patient and productive borders on impossible.
And so, when the delusion finally cracks, he escapes into new fantasies of sexual conquests, traditional masculine heroism, and the very modern masculine manosphere shaped desires of ostentatious wealth and swagger. Mirages that are the inevitable consequence of a culture that sells self-reinvention to people who can’t even piece together stability.
These are, more or less, the beats of the story of my new show, Old Fat F**k Up. Part confession, part stand-up, part breakdown – a darkly funny, uncomfortable hour and a bit that slides between sincerity and absurdity. By the end, the joke – and the tragedy – is that it’s not just his story. It’s ours. Because how can a generation that never properly grows up really expect to raise anyone else? How can we pass on the tools to be resilient, confident, or content if the best we can do is impersonate those qualities, to impersonate being proper grown ups. We’re going to have to find a way – let’s fake it till we make it!
Old Fat F**k will be at Riverside Studios over 25 performances from 5th November – 20th December. Ticket link HERE.