A comedy of the American Dream

10:00am Thursday 28th August 2008

A.S.H. SMYTH talks to Loudon Wainwright III who has written the music for the stage version of Lucky You at the Oxford Playhouse

"Two crazed rednecks, one long-legged waitress, A sexy veterinarian, $28m. People will believe anything (. . . and they did)"

"If you're writing an adaptation for the stage," warns director Francis Matthews, "the one thing you've got to have is really good characters." He couldn't have hoped for better than Bode and Chub, the chief idiots in Carl Hiaasen's insane Floridan crime caper, Lucky You.

These far-right, off-the-scale red-neck morons (a lobster thief and a forger of disabled-parking badges, respectively) believe that "darker forces" are keeping the white man down; that NATO is irradiating American cows; and that air pollution comes from Canada. Naturally, they establish a militia - "like it says in the Second Amendment" - calling themselves the White Rebel Brotherhood before realising it's the name of a local B-side band.

They're gonna need cash, of course, and lots of it. So when they discover they've won the Lotto - but only half the Lotto - they decide to reclaim the "stolen" $14m: "The shitweasel holding the other Lotto ticket, he's either a Negro, Jew or Cuban type."

"He" turns out to be JoLayne Lucks ("be a lady tonight", and so on), a black American vet with a passion for turtles, and altogether the wrong woman from whom to steal anything at all.

Hiaasen's novels have the flavour of My Name Is Earl with razors taped to the sides, and, in many ways, Lucky You is an angry lament, if not for the whole of America then at least for the writer's home state ("There ain't a whole lot of difference between Mickey Mouse and a fibreglass Madonna").

Helping me navigate through Hiaasen's trademark chaotic dark-side comedy is the renowned singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III.

Apart from possessing the greatest name ever (Tokyo Sexwale, Jubilation T. Cornpone, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde were all joint second), Wainwright - or Mr III, if we're being formal - has been nominated for two Grammys, appeared in three episodes of M*A*S*H, and written the music for Knocked Up (in which he also appeared). Johnny Cash recorded one of his songs. He provided humorous interludes for Jasper Carrott's show. And he is the winner, by a furlong, of the All-Time Best Biographical Blurb award: "After the War (II) my father Loudon (II) came home with his bride Martha (I). My parents had sex and nine months later I was born albeit almost backwards."

The biog not only has footnotes, but the footnotes are lyrics from his own songs. All of which may (or may not) explain why he was chosen to write the music for the stage version of Lucky You.

Wainwright talks with an easy charm.

"I had never read any of Carl Hiaasen's novels, though I'd seen them everywhere (they're ubiquitous!). But I was struck by the tone of the book . . . I really enjoyed it, and felt it was a project to which I could contribute something."

Wainwright's witty, self-mocking style is a perfect match for Hiaasen's worldview, and it was John Plowman, erstwhile BBC head of comedy and co-writer of Lucky You, who put the two men together. Their shared dry, dark humour is exemplified by the lyrics to the title tune, Florida (Lucky You), with its juxtaposed references to Disneyland, slaughtering the natives, and the state being the shape of "a big ol' handgun". The too-cheery Riders on the Storm bossa nova beat (Jim Morrison is among the "famous Floridians") and the jeering chorus of "Lucky you/them/him" constitute a short, sharp synopsis of how the American Dream came to be typified by fat pensioners pushing quarters into fruit machines.

"They thought my sensibilities would match up with Carl's," Wainwright chuckles - read: "We're both as mad as a box of frogs." - "but Warren Zevon would have gotten the gig if he'd been alive. I was a distant second." True enough, Zevon, a close friend of Hiaasen until his death five years ago, even gets a mention in the script.

One thing has been troubling me. Hiaasen and Wainwright are great modern American traditions (the same could even be said of Florida), so why the world premier at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh?

"I've no idea! Hm. Well, Florida is a weird world unto itself. Why wouldn't the people of Scotland be interested in that?"

He's bluffing, of course. Wainwright's been touring the UK since the early 1970s and is well acquainted with the workings of the (in)famous British sense of humour. If anyone knows what's going to cut it over here, it's Loudon Wainwright III.

That said, adaptation of Hiaasen's work has been famously troubled (if you own Striptease on DVD it's not because of his literary merit . . .). "Every author," Hiaasen admits, "is curious . . . and nervous about how it's going to work."

But the Lucky You play script packs in all the needful, including importantly, Hiaasen's uncompromising narrative voice. And having booked himself a command performance in a small theatre in Key West - "a perfectly perverse venue for this kind of production" - he seems happy with the end result.

"It was very rewarding to hear the laughter, and to know that there are that many other sick people out there who get it."

Carl Hiaasen's Lucky You is at the Oxford Playhouse from Monday until Saturday, September 6. Box office: 01865 305305.

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