“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.”
Latest from Arts
by Min Jin Lee (Author) The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE “This masterpiece is the novel of the decade, if not
“Watkins has never written more confidently or staked so much on her unmistakable voice, which winds
Notes to a Black Woman by Françoise Ega (Author), Emma Ramadan (Translator) “The extraordinary testimony of
“Solitaria is a gem.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments “For fans of Fernanda
