Hurry! 3:09–3:19, Wednesday, June 10, 2026
A bit over 10 questions in 10 minutes on the musical Hurry, 591 BC–2007
Sally O’Reilly loves to collaborate. ‘I get really bored of myself’, she tells me after our interview (our collaboration?) has come to an end, describing collaboration as getting to try on ‘someone else’s interior wardrobe’. On July 24, she’ll team up with her frequent musical collaborator, Kit Downes, as well as a talented crew of even more artists and musicians—Myra Eetgerink, Hannah Hurtzig, Nina Katchadourian, Augustin Maurs, and Michelle Madsen, among others—to try to create a musical, Hurry, 591 BC–2007, from scratch in a single working day at Berlin’s Lettrétage. The musical draws its name from Hurry: 591 BC–2007, a book that, twenty years ago, promised to be ‘the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Hurry’—composed of ‘bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage’—and was wholly authored by a computer. The happening is occurring under the auspices of the little magazine, Cabinet, as an extension of its forays into 24-hour book projects, which have seen such luminaries as Brian Dillon and O’Reilly herself take part.
The musical’s time-constrained conceit inspired our interview: 10 questions in 10 minutes. In our hurry, though, we might have lost count of the questions and answers—and there might be a few too many. But, as O’Reilly noted, a constraint is really just a ‘launch mechanism’. A near-verbatim transcript follows.
How did you find out about Webster’s Timeline Histories series?
I was looking for a book about theatrical quick change, and there are no books about it—other than the Webster’s Timeline History on it. And then the whole series all revealed itself from there.
And how did you alight on Hurry, 591 BC–2007 among the 90,000 titles?
Because we knew we had to make this musical in a hurry, and I do like a bit of self-referential thematic tightness.
Well that begins to answer another question I had: will this time-constrained musical feel rushed—
—utterly hurried? Yeah, to the core, it’s going to be atrocious. I mean, for us as makers, it’s going to feel really horrible, I imagine.
Ach, I’m sorry. I understand this also deals with AI. So, does the idea of hurry or of performing under haste or something like that have a correlation with artificial intelligence?
Well, maybe you could say that we’re having to work this quickly because if we don’t make this musical first, then AI probably will.
How do you prepare for something like this?
I am reading the book at the moment, which is 300 pages of extracts scraped from the internet in 2007—anything to do with anything that contains the word ‘hurry’ or ‘hurried’. So I’m reading that, which is horrible. It’s just little scraps of stuff. I’m going to digest that, and then I’m going to feed it to my collaborators. And then at 10am that morning, we will see what we can make from the material.
So you will figure out some way of collecting together and presenting what you found before you begin on the 24th?
Yes—in a sort of compacted version. I won’t ask them to read through all the absolute dreck that is in that book. I am going to pick out some choice morsels, and then maybe also give them a precis of the historical sweep of hurry, because there are there are moments where certain kinds of hurries are more prominent than others,—there’s lots of armies hurrying all over the place in certain periods, and at other times there’s lots of people hurrying to romantic trysts and bedrooms, so you can map types of hurry through historical epochs. I’ll digest it for them in that way.
Was there anything that tied hurry together in 2007? Or is it too disparate, spread out across the internet, with many too many different genres there to really be able to synthesize a single type of hurry that predominates?
I’m still in the 1930s! I’m still reading. I can’t rush, I can’t hurry reading hurry, because it would make me sick. I think it’s too rich. It’s like eating a meal entirely made of nougat.
I wouldn’t want to hurry your eating of nougat, or your reading this book! Apologies for that. So you have worked with Kit Downes before. How did the two of you decide to work on this project?
Simply, Kit lives in Berlin, and he’s a musician that I know and love and have worked with. He has that jazz improv attitude, where he’s unfazed by anything, so I just knew he’d be a good solid ground to have in there. I know Nina [Katchadourian], but have never worked with her, and she will know a couple of the others, but I don’t know if anyone else will know anyone else. It’s like, getting a team together in a hurry, we’ll end up with who we end up with, and it’ll be great, because it’ll be a right old hodgepodge of talents and capacities, and tastes.
I’m trying to figure out how many questions I’ve asked so far. In my hurry to ask as many as I could I’ve sort of jumped around. Is there any worry that you’ll forget anything in the process of putting the musical together in the 10 hours?
I mean, whenever you’re hurrying—I don’t know about you—but all the doors slam shut, all the mental doors slam shut, and I don’t have access to everything that I have when I’m at my leisure. So, I imagine we are going to forget all sorts of things, we’re going to forget whole chunks of material that we’ve prepared, we’re going to forget our lines, we’re going to forget what we’re doing, we’re going to forget what the point of this is. We’re going to forget everything at every level, I should think, because we’re going to be in such a hurry.
Why did you choose the constraint of it being improvised, improvisational, when you knew that it was going to run up against the possibilities for imagination, and all the mental processes?
Well, Cabinet have a series of books that are written in 24 hours. I’ve done one of those, and I guess time is flavor of constraint. Because I’m a writer, working through constraints is a kind of well-practiced foil, whereby it forces the sorts of decisions you wouldn’t ordinarily make, and I think when working with collaborators, as well, when you’re working within time constraints, people have to blurt, you have to not be precious, and I think, I hope, some really wild stuff will come out. So, yeah, it is a constraint, but it’s also a sort of launch mechanism for a different mode of travel to one that you might ordinarily take.
So this 10 hours, this 10 isn’t important in and of itself…
It’s the venue, access to the venue.
The amount of time?
Yes. Real world constraints as well. The infrastructures of the society you find ourselves working in—it’s good to acknowledge them.
In your research of hurry, have you found that hurry is always bouncing off real-world constraints?
I can dip my toe into the digest. Let’s have a look. There’s hurrying to invade cities and regions, to reclaim them, or for armies, to mobilize them, or in the face of an invasion, or to crush rebellions. So, there’s a lot of politics in hurry, lots of hurrying to court, or to kiss a monarch’s hand, or throw oneself at their feet, and lots of hurrying to governors to warn them of uprisings and revolts. So, yeah, there’s a lot of hurrying around, that kind of structuring of the world. And then there’s the more metaphysical hurrying, where people hurry to their graves, and to conclusions, and to their ruin, and beyond the truth, and into marriage. There’s lots of being hurried into marriage and hurried into mysterious affairs and doom and things like that. On the structural material front, there’s hurrying to bedrooms, and there’s lots of doors, and tons of trains, actually lots of hurrying for trains and carriages—so yeah, a lot of architecture and infrastructure.
I’ve thought of the latter but not as much of the former. Hurrying sounds more exciting than I’ve given it credit for. What can people expect who might come to the performance? We might have gone over 10 questions.
What can they expect? I wish I could say! I have no idea what to expect, but we are going to aim for it to be a musical, in the loosest sense of the word. But there will be music, there will be singing, there are people who can and people who can’t, and people who don’t and won’t sing. So there’ll be all levels of competence on that front. And, I think, there might be something being done in the space in a hurry against the clock. Yeah, there’ll be some real live hurry there on stage.
Hurry, 591 BC – 2007: The Musical will be performed at Lettrétage (Veteranenstr. 21) on 24 July, 2026, at 8pm. Entrance 8.- / 5.-. More info, and tickets, here.
