As headline-writers know, one of the most potent ways of grabbing people’s attention is a great title. And at this year’s Edinburgh fringe, they don’t come much more jaw-dropping than Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked, a play by 28-year-old Mancunian Rob Hayes, which has been shocking, tickling and ultimately moving audiences at the Underbelly.

Awkward Conversations takes the form of an hour-long monologue by Bobby, a wild-eyed youth dressed only in his vest and underpants. Each of the play’s five sections sees him address a different type of animal with which he’s just had sex, starting off with a dog. Needless to say, the situation lends itself to horrified giggles, but against the odds the desperation and increasing alienation of the protagonist becomes touching too, thanks to the skilfulness of Hayes’s script and a fearless performance by Jack Holden, who delivers such arresting lines as: “Like it’s fine to say ‘having sex with a dog is quite weird’ now. But our children’s generation might be all like ‘that’s discrimination!’”

The play has been well reviewed and acclaimed by Simon Amstell. Audiences, says Hayes, have been “really positive. Although there are dick jokes, it does go somewhere else. I was worried whether an audience would see it through to the end and invest in what was actually going on beyond this dude just having awkward conversations with animals, and that’s largely been the case. You’re always going to lose people, and I think I’ve lost quite a few friends over this play, but I’m at peace with that.”

Right pedigree: Jack Holden in Awkward Conversations ... Photograph: Ben Broomfield Photograph: Ben Broomfield/Public domain

Hayes is referring to the friends who find him writing a play about bestiality just too uncomfortably weird, although when his mum and dad saw the play “they bloody loved it. I was too scared to tell them the title before they came up and then my mum called me and said, ‘Just so you know, we’ve seen the title.’”

So how did he come up with the title? “I was having a chat with a friend and I think one of us said it and we found it hilarious,” says Hayes. “Months later, I decided to write a play that would never get put on, and that title came to me and the premise.” First, Hayes put it on his website in five parts, then the director Edward Stambollouian encouraged him to turn it into a cohesive play and take it to Edinburgh. The play was staged first in Sydney in July by a company who had put on one of Hayes’s previous plays; that production will travel to the Melbourne fringe in September.

Was he tempted to add a dingo for the Aussies? “I should!” Hayes chuckles. “I could happily write this one play for the rest of my life. It could be experimental performance pieces where in every city you get a new actor playing five different animals, all native to that area.”

However, the play may be more conventional than it initially appears. “It’s the closest thing I’m ever going to write to a love story,” says Hayes, who is as genial and engaging as his play is hysterical and gnarly. “I think it follows a normal – well, not normal – a classic trajectory of romance from beginning to end. When you remove the bestiality element it does become a much more straightforward examination of what it means to love someone.”

Hayes denies, as some critics have suggested, that the zoophilia in his play is a metaphor for Bobby’s sexual attraction to children. “I did want to explore humankind’s relationship with animals because I think it’s a weird one. We anthropomorphise them on the internet or as pets; they can occupy almost every role in our life apart from that of the romantic other which, don’t get me wrong, I agree with” – he laughs – “but I just think it’s interesting how rarely it’s explored, particularly in theatre.”

After the first few drafts, Hayes gingerly started to watch a documentary about zoophilia. The thing that made him shudder the most, he says, is “when people are buying and selling horses for sexual purposes, the acronym is PHNBR which is “perfect height, no bucket required”. No detail is more telling than that.”

Hayes started writing plays when studying film and drama at Manchester University, and has 25 under his belt, though only “about four” have been produced. “Pinter was a big influence, and Beckett’s a bit of a cliche now but if you want to do anything that isn’t resolutely naturalistic, then he’s going to get his way in. But I loved surrealism as well, like Ionesco, Arthur Adamov. It was a nod for me that theatre doesn’t have to be set in a kitchen, it doesn’t have to be a family, it can go in weird places. I don’t think theatre is as transgressive as it could be or it used to be.”



His first play to be staged was The Diabolic Banquet in 2006. It had a run in Manchester and at the Edinburgh festival and was, says Hayes, “heavily inspired by Bottom and The Young Ones. It was about two recluses in a bedsit who accidentally kill someone with a frying pan and then to cover the deed they end up killing more and more people until they decide to poison the entire town.” Five years later, the King’s Head theatre in London put on A Butcher of Distinction, of which Michael Billington said, in a three-star review, “even the premise is bizarre”. In 2012, Blake Harrison, better known as Neil from The Inbetweeners, took the starring role in Step 9 (of 12) at London’s Trafalgar Studios – the play may be turned into a film with the help of Matt Lucas. Hayes has warm words for Harrison: “He was committed to it and he brought a lot of amazing stuff to the room.”

The playwright is currently working with the Young Vic as dramaturg on A Harlem Dream, a hip-hop dance show (“I’m by far the least cool element”) and a couple of sitcoms with two TV production companies. “I’m lucky now in that television’s proving a way out of penury,” he says. “Writing plays is increasingly difficult to make a living off. But it’s cool – I’ll write anything. Websites, adverts, brochures, I’ve done it all, and I continue to do it all. Anything that keeps me in my pyjamas at three in the afternoon.”

Hayes agrees that all his plays seem to be about young men in extremis. So why no women? “Women are unknowable to me obviously, as a young man,” he chuckles. “I think a lot of social hierarchy is inherently patriarchal and if you’re trying to write about power dynamics, men have this weird burden to be men. It’s so easy to fail at being a man, and I think that’s what interested me about it at first. But there’s so much I’d love to write, hopefully with plenty of active female characters and male/female dynamics and female/female dynamics.” And probably fewer man/dog dynamics too.

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