The Remember Oluwale Writing Prize
Award-winning writer and stand up comedian Jonny Potts (WGTN) is getting ready to bring a herculean hour of hilarity and intensity to the 2016 Dunedin Fringe Festival. ‘LOOSE: A Private History of Booze and Iggy Pop 1996-2015’ kicks off on 7 March, at Taste Merchants, marking the show’s South Island premiere.
Described as ‘startling in its perfectly ordinary wonderfulness’ (theatreview.org.nz), LOOSE is a compendium of twenty stories, one for each year in two decades of Jonny’s life. They’re all true, and they all deal with two constants: drinking booze and listening to Iggy Pop.
LOOSE will run for four nights only in Dunedin, one of New Zealand's great cultural centres. "Growing up, I was envious of everything I heard and saw about Dunedin" says Jonny, "The place and the people made cheap beer and woolly jerseys seem glamorous."
LOOSE has three acclaimed seasons under its belt. It opened in the 2015 NZ Fringe Festival, which garnered Jonny seven award nominations and won him three of the festival’s major recognitions: Best Writing, Best Stand Up and the SYNZ Touring Award, which saw the show play to enthusiastic audiences in Sydney in September.
“Jonny is a remarkably gifted performer... he is not afraid to do what he thinks is good and then sell the shit out of it.”
“I have never had so many people offer to buy me a drink after a show as I have with this one" says Jonny, "LOOSE is the most personal thing I've ever done, and I'm so relieved that people are responding to it so positively."
Alongside his regular stand-up gigs, Jonny writes, acts and hosts two popular podcasts – The Witching Hours and Year of Reading Massively. He writes for film and theatre, and performs as part of Wellington’s award-winning theatre company The Bacchanals. He also plays a central role in Binge Culture Collective’s’ Enter the New World’, another Wellington work to be featured in this year’s Dunedin Fringe.
“[LOOSE] is like a hilarious, poignant and very intelligent dog that won't let go of your brain"
-Ashleigh Young, Victoria University Press
But right now, the focus is squarely on LOOSE. “In the months before we first opened I had nothing to do but hone this show. There's a lot in here, but I swear this is as tight as I could make LOOSE. I hope Dunedin audiences find something in it. Preferably laughs. Laughs would be good."
