Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – David Foster Wallace’s 1999 collection of postmodernist short stories – seems an extremely unlikely candidate for a comic stage adaptation. Stories include the nihilistic all-encompassing darkness experienced by a nameless ‘Depressed Person’ and are composed, sometimes, of pages in which tangential footnotes run longer than the main body of the text.[1] However directors Josh Dolphin and Penny Cartwright have put together a hilarious reworking of a seemingly unadaptable, unconnected series of stories, which Wallace fans and unfamiliars alike will love, showcasing the repugnant, bizarre, fetishist extremities of humanity that bind the eponymous hideous men.

We enter the poky Burton Taylor Studio as a darkened room, illuminated singularly by a projection of an anachronistic digital clock flitting over the sound of a tachycardic low-end pulse, setting the stage in a familiar Wallace register of anxiety and dourness: bollocks, I thought, this is going to be an Antonin Artaud-esque indulgent butchering of stories I love in the name of avant-garde theatre. I was wrong. The first ‘interview’ [2], centred around a man who cannot suppress involuntarily yawping ‘Victory for the forces of democratic freedom’ upon ejaculation, cracked the audience up spectacularly, and the laughs continued from then on to pervade the entire production. This show is agonisingly funny, chronicling the ridiculously egregulous sexual obsessions and sociopathic physical needs of vain, hideous men, delivered with properly impressive monologic [3] prowess, especially considering this is a student production. And it’s not just funny – there are genuine moments of gloom/tenderness/existential doubt, which is a particularly astounding achievement in the context of a tale concerning the career of a stoic toilet attendant. This staging also brings an innovative fecundity to Wallace’s ingenious but heavily stylised writing in that the exuberant language is freed to be enjoyed as debauched euphony to the ear (words like ‘threnody’ and ‘feculent’ have to be spoken aloud to become as deliciously transfigured as they are here).

So what this production really does is demonstrate the porousness of certain artistic borders. A loyal adaptation of the disparate stories really isn’t possible – instead what’s offered here is a brilliant transposition of iconic and uniquely bilious characters into an enormously entertaining show. Miss it at your peril.

[1] A habit which fans of DFW will tell you emulates the experience of human thinking: a series of sequential epiphenomenal thoughts. Getting that style of writing to work would be really difficult in performance.

[2] These weren’t really interviews, nor were they really monologues neither. The introduction of an interviewer character is largely where John Krasinski’s abysmal 2009 film adaptation began to go wrong, trying to foist a flaccid totalising narrative arc on the stories.

[3] Again, more subtle than mere monologues. I could call this adaptation ‘Talking Heads for Generation X’, but that’d be an ostensibly vain attempt at being quoted on promotional materials. I’d never do that.