So So Scandalous

Tim Fountain can’t get enough of Julie Burchill. He’s dramatized the likes of Quentin Crisp, Rock Hudson and Sebastian Horsley. But his latest play, Julie Burchill: Absolute Cult, is the first time he’s returned to anyone. The one-woman show is a belated sequel to filthily hilarious Edinburgh hit Julie Burchill is Away.

So what’s the explanation? “She’s the only one I haven’t killed!” Fountain laughs down the phone. Rather unfortunately, Crisp died on his way to Resident Alien’s premiere, while Horsley passed away days after Dandy in the Underworld opened.

In reality, Fountain’s been fascinated by Burchill since the first play. “I’ve watched her career develop and to some extent, by her own admission, go into managed decline,” he says. “She’s probably a better subject now, because of that Gloria Swanson element. And the fact she carries on regardless.”

Absolute Cult finds the controversial newspaper columnist at a crossroads: with her career fading, should she go on Celebrity Big Brother? “And we all know what that means,” says Fountain. “Career salvation or end-of-the-pier show.”

Burchill saw the script for the first play. Has she seen this one? “Not a word of it!” Fountain laughs. “But Julie’s thing has always been that if you give it, you’ve got to take it.”

He continues: “And I’m not doing anything other than trying to tell the truth about her as I see her now – for good, for bad and for ugly.”

Burchill typifies Fountain’s fascination with 'the dandy' who, he argues, doesn’t have to be male. “It’s just someone for whom the veneer has become their essence.” He sees the “high-wire act” performed by those who embrace self-parody as perfect for theatre.

“If you say, as Julie does [in the show], ‘I don’t care what other people think of me’, that sets up a tension. You, as the audience, instantly go, ‘That can’t be true, can it?’”

Fountain has also dared people to judge him, with his 2004 show Sex Addict, which opened in Edinburgh before transferring to London. In it, audiences chose which of the men Fountain was chatting to online he would have sex with. The Daily Mail, of course, was scandalised.

The suggestion that Sex Addict was just about shocking people still frustrates Fountain. It was, he maintains, about turning an honest spotlight on a reality of life. “Certain sections of the press just wanted me to be judgemental and say, ‘Isn’t it terrible, this Internet stuff?’”

A decade on, and a slew of shows like Channel 4’s Sex Box are—superficially, at least—doing something similar to Sex Addict. Fountain is content to let them be. “I’m done with it now. If someone were to ask me what I think about sex, I’d probably take the Boy George line and say ‘I’ll just have a cup of tea.’”

But he still likes to “shake things up.” Absolute Cult won’t be for the easily offended. Returning to Edinburgh is “a kind of liberation," he enthuses. "I’ve written what I wanted to write. No one's been breathing down my neck.”