Animal Fucker

I can assure the above is not a typo, which is not to say it isn’t a fantastic title – James Dalton will tell you as much as well. After the success of A Butcher Of Distinction last year under Dalton’s direction at the Old 505, its UK-based playwright Rob Hayes struck up a professional friendship with Dalton and began sending him new and as yet unpublished scripts.

“One of them [was] this new play Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked, and a title like that was something I couldn’t say no to.”

"A title like that was something I couldn’t say no to.”

Heath Ivey-Law, who Dalton cast in A Butcher Of Distinction, returned for another investigation into Hayes’ writing, taking on the lone role as Bobby and delving once more into Hayes’ strange balance of social realism and absurd comedy at Dalton’s side.

“We started to just unpick what was sometimes dirty jokes, sometimes a little bit racy, and we discovered that Rob has this very beautiful sensitivity to characters who are a little bit ‘outsider’,” Dalton explains. “This main character, Bobby, he’s not a caricature, he’s not this deranged animal fucker that we’re going to be laughing at: it’s actually a play about loneliness, love, and the desire to preserve beauty in a world that’s very quickly becoming just about business.”

To reassure most, the show itself contains no feline fornication, no canine canoodling, no no-pants-dancing with deer – it’s about the conversations that happen after the act, played out as a series of monologues by Bobby. So, while the relationship between humans and animals is addressed, it’s a little more ‘man’s best friend’ than ‘man’s best friend with benefits’, and addresses some serious issues beneath the farcical veneer of its premise.

“It’s about conservation, it’s about animal rights, it’s about the relationship between humans and animals and what we define as being the correct way of relating to an animal and what is the abject way.”

The play is a series of five monologues, each beginning immediately after Bobby has had a one-night-stand with an animal – each of these, Dalton stresses, are consensual – and revealing him as he attempts to get a sense of what they’ve just engaged in, and what stands ahead for them.

“Five monologues just about relationships is not going to be that interesting – even if you have an [animal] joke for each one. But worked through it is a progressive story as Bobby begins to understand his place in the world, and rises up against that place to make a new life for himself.”

Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked will be presented for a limited run of four shows as part of the Bondi Feast.