You don’t want to miss Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen’s Australian tour

There are people who were in on the ground up with Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, who can say that they first saw those stories when they were onstage, maybe in Edinburgh.

Those audiences were the vanguard, they knew they had seen something special before those productions were adapted for the screen and blew up all over the world.

There’s something special too about Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen, which has already being anointed as Fleabag and Baby Reindeer’s compatriot by virtue of the fact it’s being produced by the same company.

But there is also a similarity in tone, playfulness and a willingness to be exposed, to confess, to share traumas and to elicit laughs and heartbreak.

The production is a one-man show written by Australian-born playwright Marcelo Dos Santos and performed by actor Samuel Barnett. It’s currently on at the Sydney Opera House after a rousing run at the Arts Centre Melbourne and will also hit Adelaide.

The story is being told to the audience by the character of The Comedian, who tells you from the offset that he is an unreliable narrator who is going to kill his boyfriend.

The boyfriend in question is an American, whose name might be Zack or Dawson from maybe Boston or Sacramento. Not knowing for sure is part of the play’s clever storytelling construct of reality or unreality.

The Comedian sometimes revises as he goes, and Barnett does all the different characters, but always from the perspective of the unnamed protagonist.

One of the hooks is that the character is a stand-up comedian and the American has a condition called cataplexy, which essentially means that he cannot physically laugh, because if he does, he dies.

Yes, the irony. But also how smart to have someone who so desperately needs validation from an audience but cannot get it from the person he really wants it from, and what behaviours, some self-destructive ones, does he resort to, to satisfy that need.

Dos Santos knew he wanted to write something about gay dating and hook-up culture that was personal but not necessarily autobiographical.

Once he learnt about cataplexy and realised that he was already writing the play with a set-up and pay-off rhythm to its jokes, The Comedian was formed, and that it’s framed as a stand-up set was a useful narrative device to carry a story that was true or not true or somewhere in between.

“The unreliable narrator stuff has landed much more in Australian than it did (in London),” Dos Santos told The Nightly. He’s not quite sure why that is but it is clearly attuned with the local audience.

But Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen is not clever just to be clever.

Everyone who sees the play has a different interpretation of the ending, and of what’s real and what’s not. What Barnett believes is not what its director, Matthew Xia, does.

“There are as many different endings as there are people,” Barnett said. But his interpretation of it follows the rule that, as an actor, he “can’t play an idea, so I’ve had to find the emotional truth it in.

“I was talking to someone last night and he said, ‘Oh, I’d very dissatisfied if a lot of that wasn’t true. I was like, ‘Yeah, I get it, because you’ve got your heart involved in it’.”

The bad choices The Comedian makes, if he makes them, the grief and anxiety that fuels them, it’s universal. It just happens that audiences are taken on quite the wild ride to get to the end.

The specificities of it though, many of them are drawn from Dos Santos’ experience, or those of people he knows.

But, for a time, he resisted from writing anything too autobiographical. “I think that was tied into slight homophobia from when I was new to writing.

“There were conversations where it was like, ‘You don’t want to get ghetto-ed doing ‘gay stuff’.”

A conversation with another writer who very simply put it to him, ‘”Why don’t you do you?”, freed him.

“It was quite liberating at first, but then there’s the moment then when you put it in front of (people). Each time it was like, ‘Oh gosh, actually people are going to see me, and that is quite exposing, but it is liberating to push through because what else can you do really?”

With those comparisons to Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, the question of whether it’ll ever be made for screen is inevitable.

Dos Santos said there are conversations happening. “There is a world in which it could happen, but there are also people in the industry who are also quite reluctant. The mess is off-putting to some people. That’s a thing one has to wrest with because people think it’s kind-of wanky, basically.”

If it were to make the jump, Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen would need to be broadened for the screen, its world built out, its characters named.

“Potentially, that’s so exciting, but I think it’s exciting when you find the new language for that,” Barnett said. “But the question from TV people would be, ‘Yeah, but what’s the thing? What is the motor? Why is he so f**ked’ up?’.

“It would my fear with this is that it would be simplified, which is the word I was going to use to but I hesitated to use, but yes.

“Whereas something like I May Destroy You, the boldness of that final episode, how it was pure theatre and was not simplified and was not easy. So you want TV people who are going to be brave enough to back that.”

Perhaps in a few years’ time, a much larger global audience will be talking about the “hot, new” show called Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen, and for those lucky enough to have seen it during this Australian tour will feel the smugness of having already known about it.

But even if it doesn’t happen, because not everything that can be should be, there was still the magic of that night at the theatre, being challenged, teased and emotionally wrecked.

Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen is at the Sydney Opera House until February 23 and opens in Adelaide on February 26