“I find the work phenomenal, almost double the amount. But the actual city is a little bit miserable.” Lou Wall is talking about their first impressions of London, where they now live. “It’s a huge city, so often I’ll be doing gigs where I don’t know a single person. Which is exciting because, obviously, the Australian scene is much smaller.”
The culture of comedy is also different. “People go and see stand-up quite a lot here, which is exciting”, they say. “I think London audiences like wit and eloquence, whereas Australian audiences love silliness more. This is such a generalisation, but it’s good to work in both places and my ideal humour is someone who’s incredibly smart and incredibly dumb at the same time.”
Now Wall is back in Australia to perform Breaking the Fifth Wall, a show about ‘lying, mental breakdowns and the internet’. “Lying is seen as something that’s incredibly evil and malicious,” they say. “Then I think about stand-up comedy as an art form. And storytelling, in its essence, is exaggeration. I think stand-up comedy is really interesting because we all speak in first person, we’re playing ourselves. And we are often held accountable for our stories when in reality a lot of us are just pulling them out of our ass. So, I wanted to explore that.”
Their writing routine has changed in the last year. “Usually I don’t write scripts,” they say. “I’ll just create the video content and remember, in my head, which is terrible for any tech, any director, anyone who’s ever watched. And then my preview of the first festival that I do will often be the first time I’ve shown a lot of the work to people. But this year, because London has this culture of work-in-progress shows, I’ve done two WIPs and it’s been life changing. I can only work when I have a deadline and a paying audience is honestly the perfect deadline, because I’m a people pleaser, and I don’t want to let anyone down. I did my two WIPs and now I have a month until the shows and it’s offered me space to rewrite everything and really invest in what I actually mean.”
Breaking the Fifth Wall is their second show directed by Zoë Coombs Marr. “She’s brilliant,” Wall says. “She has a brain like no other and is such a great director because she’s so dedicated to making the work good but also to making the person who is doing the work feel good, which is so important. Our egos in this community are so fragile.”
Coombs Marr quickly helped Wall get over their fear of showing work before it’s finished. “This year I let her into my Google Drive,” they say, “which last year I never would have done. Because my Google Drive has 25 to 30 documents of just ramblings, which, if you read, you’d think lobotomy should be brought back.”
The pair previously worked together on The Bisexual’s Lament, which Wall wrote – according to its description – after their ‘worst year ever’, although they’re not sure that was really the case. “I’m very dramatic,” they say. “I probably just had a bad day and a burnt coffee. I never write from a place of trauma, I can only make light of something and make it funny once I’m over it.”
Some of their previous work is rooted in a fascination with conspiracy theories. “I just find them deeply camp and deeply funny,” they say. “I started getting into conspiracy theories in 2016, mainly because I was on the internet a lot, and I was creating a lot of memes. And it was just a topic that was easy to make fun of. But obviously we’re in a pretty crazy world right now, when conspiracy theories have become incredibly dangerous.” Wall has always been interested in people on the fringes of society and is reluctant to label anyone as evil or crazy. “If conspiracy theories are spawning out of nowhere, it’s usually because there is a deep distrust running through society,” they say. “Which means something is wrong with it. I think they’re incredibly reflective of the current state of politics.”
Despite spending a lot of time on the internet, they have no strong feelings about it. “I think either loving it or hating it is kind of futile,” they say. “Obviously I’m on TikTok every single day, but other than my Instagram I don’t really have much front facing stuff, because I’m quite scared of that reaction. I think we underestimate influencers’ ability to deal with that many people’s opinions about you on a daily basis.”
In the future, they would like to move into television. “I would love to write my own TV show,” they say. “I love screen. I think with stage I always try and write for audiences who are addicted to the internet because I want to make the scrolling experience. I’d love to move into a space where I’m writing for screen, whether that’s phone screen, TV screen, movie screen.”
Regardless of the format, Wall just wants to make people happy. “I definitely always have a message,” they say. “My question at the heart of Breaking the Fifth Wall is ‘can lying ever be good’? But in terms of what I want to say, I don’t really have any original thoughts. I’m definitely a follower, I’ve never set a trend in my life. I just always want people to come out having shared laughter.”
Lou Wall – Breaking the Fifth Wall, Gluttony, until 23 March