The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is something like a South Bank Show House of Leaves: it’s the narrative of the making of a documentary that never gets made, about a movie that also never got made. Its protagonist-narrator is Richard Ayoade, an alter ego of the author of the book, Richard Ayoade. He’s in search of an alter ego of his own – or, at least, a doppelganger.
The late Harauld Hughes – author of era-defining plays with titles such as Platform, Table, Roast, Roost, Prompt, Flight, Shunt and Dependence, and subsequently a hack screenwriter – is Ayoade’s white whale. It so happens that the playwright’s author photograph looks extremely like Richard Ayoade, except that Hughes “wore the kind of glasses I would search for, in vain, from that moment on”.
