Unfinished Harauld Hughes

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.

‘So funny — Nabokov meets Spinal Tap.’ – Stephen Merchant
‘Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.’ – Tim Key
‘Absolutely miraculous.’ – Jesse Eisenberg
‘A brain-swirlingly funny quest.’ – Robert Popper

Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Imprint: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 03/12/2024