LaughRiot.co.uk

“Bill Hicks: Slight Return” Director interview Pt 1

LaughRiot.co.uk had the pleasure of speaking to Richard Hurst, director and co-writer of “Bill Hicks: Slight Return” which begins its last two weeks ever at Central London’s Arts Centre today (26th September).

To begin with we talked about why the show had been delayed from its planned opening a week earlier.

RH: It’s not ideal but that is laryngitis for you. Chas is completely unable to speak so that does rather exclude us from being able to do it. We’ve put the whole thing back a week, and so the week after is booked for the run as well.

LR: Can you give us an idea of what the show is all about?

RH: The premise of the show is that Bill Hicks comes back from the dead for a night to talk about events since his passing in 1994. It’s partly a play about his legacy. When Chas and I had the idea it was coming up to the tenth anniversary of Bill’s death and, partly because of the situation in Iraq, lots of people were saying, “where’s Bill Hicks when we need him”. We were kind of interested in that question, and that is what the play is there to answer really. So it’s about his legacy, about why people ten years on are still asking that question, and it is there to say that it would be great if Bill was still around, but also saying that we have to move on as well.

LR: Did either of you get to see Bill live?

RH: Chas was very lucky, he went to see him in Exeter in 1992/3, when he was doing his fairly early tours of the UK. I was unlucky as I saw Dennis Leary doing the same material at the same time at the Reading Festival! But I had heard of Bill at university and I had heard bits and pieces on cassette, which we played and re-played. From that I discovered the CDs and the longer stuff. And then when Chas came to me with the idea I jumped at the chance.

LR: Bill was a huge influence, are there any current comedians who could be classed as being in his category?

RH: Funny you should mention this but I write a blog for the BBC occasionally, and lots of people ask this question since we have been doing the show. And in a weird way, I suddenly thought that Josie Long was the most Bill-like person I could think of. Not because she has the kind of anger and the venom and the righteous fire that Bill had, but because she has got the same sort of purity about her, in terms of comedy being there to answer the big questions about how we live our lives. In terms of what she is trying to do with comedy I think there is a weird cross-over there.

There are lots of people who are more like Bill in their manner, people like Brendon Burns and Jim Jeffries and so on. But a lot of those angry youngish male comedians lack the love that Bill had for humanity, he had a real frustration with humanities failure to live up to what it could achieve. At the end of the day I think that, as the title of a biography of Bill says, he did “Love all the people”.

Read the rest of this interview