Edy Hurst on making his own version of War Of The Worlds

Written by: Edy Hurst
Published: Friday 19th August 2022

Has this ever happened to you? Have you started making a show only to watch it over the course of a year go from a work of nonsense pop culture exploration to having a bizarrely prescient message about the times that we've all lived through? Well, like me, it looks like you've accidentally made a show that's become relevant.

Also, are you sure you're not me? Because that sounds like a wildly specific set of circumstances to be in.

As a peddler of slightly abstract musical comedy, I've always been more interested in creating surreal views of the world than observations on the day to day of life. I like that musical comedy gives you a bit of a way in to this in a more mainstream context because everybody understands what music is, so the idea of being a weird-o around a song gives you a bit of a bridge.

But when, in 2019, I started making a show where the heroes of the story are those invisible assailants themselves, germs - including bacteria, funghi, protozoa, and more notoriously, viruses - like an errant child sent to Bel Air, my life was about to get flip turned upside down.

Inspired by a bit that was cut for being too big in my last show Hurst Schmurst, I decided to recreate the War of the Worlds, as a dizzying number of people have before me, paying homage to hero and disco rock musical pioneer Jeff Wayne.

Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds is a stone-cold banger, and always makes me laugh because of the idea that by calling it Jeff Wayne's Musical Version, he was clearly concerned about the plethora of other Musical Versions that definitely exist he didn't want his production to be confused with.

A big daft laugh about fictional martians, coming down in their fictional space ships, causing a fiction war on European soil, then to be defeated by [spoilers for a 120 year-old book] not so fictional bacteria.

A WIP performance in Leicester and less than 28 days later we were in a national lockdown from a pandemic largely the fault of germs. The cheek! They're meant to be the good guys of my story, and now they're doing this?

In many ways it's a great gift to suddenly have something you're working on suddenly become topical. How many other shows about a book that's nearly 125 years-old can say they've randomly become timelier? Maybe a poem about the Suez Canal that now has to add a bit about that big boat getting stuck?

The real challenge though is that something that you had thought was flippant and inconsequential has become very real, and very real for everyone. Is doing something big and daft actually appropriate, is it doing a disservice to the shared experiences we've all shared at the invisible hands of germs gone wild?

Well, probably not, I think like most arguments about 'can you joke about that?' the more nuanced and accurate but less retweet-able answer is 'it depends how you do it.'

Even when you're popping on a giant plaster-of-paris helmet as a martian invader and wobbling across the stage to make your demands, it's all about making a human (or Earth/Mars) connection. It would be as much a disservice to our individual stories and experiences to completely ignore a way to reflect this world we've lived in through via a big daft story about squid-like drum-headed bullies.

The big change from when I started making the show to now, alongside the pandemic, is that I've ended up becoming a bit of an accidental expert on War of the Worlds and it's many, many, many, many, many different re-makes, retelling and (both authorised and unofficial) sequels. Whilst making a podcast that re-told each chapter, adding in deep dives of research and interviews from comedians and academics, I know more about it than I ever thought I would, or thought I wanted to.

And if there's one thing that I've learnt from that, it's how folks seems to find something new about the source material. It can be seen as an allegory for colonialist invasion, a critique of news reporting fact vs fiction, a lesson in biology via heat rays, or even a fully functioning cycling holiday route from Woking to central London. Much like a Pizza Hut buffet, there's something for everyone.

So what do you do when your show accidentally becomes very relevant to what felt like quite a specific plot point? Anything you like! Existence is chaos, there's no meaning! You're a free agent! Who cares, we'll all be dead one day!

Maybe we always read older stories in a way that will change them, and this change is inevitable and natural, so embrace it and make something that means something to the people you're performing to?

Nah. There are too many versions of the War of the Worlds, I'm putting an end to it, let's finish it. Together.