RON is an absurd, violent, genre-bending queer odyssey exploring the nature of unrequited love; how far would you go to show someone you love them?
At its heart, RON is about queer longing, obsession and the strange, sometimes destructive ways we try to prove love to one another. Starting in the familiar setting of a McDonald’s before spiralling into increasingly surreal and violent territory, the show twists stand-up comedy and emotional confession into something wildly unpredictable.
A Youngish Perspective holds this exclusive dialogue with the writer and star of the show, Ted Walliker.
- RON seems fascinated by the moment where performance collapses and something darker or more sincere begins to emerge. Were you consciously interested in the thin line between stand up as confession and stand up as concealment?
The show’s origins are certainly connected to that thin line. I wrote my BA dissertation at university about the construction of stand-up comedy, culminating in a practical piece called ‘Stand-Up Tragedy’ in which a comedian unravels personal truths, leaving behind the concealment and resorting entirely to confession. I enjoyed making that, but ultimately when it came to creating RON I found there was a lot more to be enjoyed about the interplay between confession and concealment. There’s also an argument to be made for not knowing which device is being used at certain points to create more intrigue around this bizarre character we’re watching.
- The show is described as absurd, violent and tender all at once. What attracts you to those violent tonal shifts rather than staying within the safety of a single genre or emotional register?
The word safety is definitely the key there. As an audience member I love nothing more than feeling like I genuinely couldn’t guess what’s going to happen next. But that’s not to say it’s about randomness, there’s a logic and a process behind it all. The comedy group Aunty Donna are a particular favourite of mine because they work to a philosophy of ‘doing whatever is funniest’ regardless of traditional comedic construction – they often get labelled as wholly absurdist, as a result, but I think it goes beyond that. When people say ‘expect the unexpected’, you generally do so and the unexpected becomes expected, but Aunty Donna are such craftspeople that you’re continually delighted and surprised by each bit.
- There is something almost mythic in the phrase “the Ron person in the Ron place at the Ron time.” Did you think of Tony as an everyman figure trapped inside his own emotional odyssey, or is he someone much more specific and dangerous than that?
Without giving too much away, I think there are aspects of Tony which will feel everyman-ish and I’d say his driving force – the thing that makes him do the things he does – is, hopefully, relatable at its core. The way he processes emotions and information, however, I think makes him specifically him and I’m definitely excited by the term dangerous being ascribed to him as a result of that specificity. What a vague answer! I hope my vagueness is ultimately to the benefit of the audience of the show – I like to know absolutely nothing going in so I can experience a piece without pre-conception.
- Queer longing is often portrayed on stage through realism or intimacy, but RON seems to explode those conventions entirely. Did you feel that a more fragmented, genre-bending form was necessary to capture the irrationality of desire?
Definitely. Though, there are moments of intimacy in RON, but some of them are probably not expressions of intimacy we’d say are familiar to us. I think that’s part of it too. I hope that the emotion behind it all feels recognisable, I just felt that I had to express it in my own way. Longing can feel very irrational or urgent or uncontrollable, like a plague of the mind and heart it can consume you, particularly if you’re trying to grapple with who you are at the same time.
- You are not only writing and performing the piece, but also shaping the lighting, sound and music. Did building the entire theatrical world yourself make the process feel more like constructing a psyche than constructing a traditional play?
We spend the play in Tony’s world but I don’t know whether that felt distinct from constructing a traditional play. We’re always in someone’s world, I suppose. Sometimes that’s a much clearer mirror of the real world and sometimes we’re invited into something entirely unreal. Doing the lighting and music felt like a natural extension of Tony, for sure. The starting point for RON (beyond ‘Stand-Up Tragedy’) was actually that I was trying to write some music for someone’s short film and I ended up writing a piece that was completely inappropriate for the short, but it felt like the ending of something else. I wanted to figure out what that something was, and RON started to take shape. So, the world of the play came together as it was being written.
- The play begins in one of the most banal spaces imaginable, a McDonald’s, before spiralling into something surreal and unsettling. What interests you about using ordinary public spaces as the starting point for emotional or psychological collapse?
There’s a very specific reason for this which I mustn’t spoil. If I may continue my irritating vagueness to answer your question, though: crazy stuff happens in all sorts of places. You never know! You really never know…
Ron is on at Riverside Studios from 13th June – 5th July.