The anarchic enthusiast Ken Campbell took very little interest in ‘proper theatre’. Even so it is entirely fitting that the National Theatre should be paying tribute to his eccentric talent on October 12 in the Olivier Theatre with a line-up that includes Nina Conti, Christopher Fairbank, Toby Jones, Sylvester McCoy and John Sessions. His link with the National goes back to 1977 when his nine hour epic ‘Illuminatus!’ was the first production in the Cottesloe Theatre. Peter Hall, then the artistic director, strangely turned down the offer to appear for three minutes as the man who wants to run the world. Later, Hall’s successor Richard Eyre, who is directing the National’s tribute, regularly invited Ken to bring his one man shows to the Cottesloe including ‘Recollections of a Furtive Nudist’, ‘Jamais Vu’ and ‘Pigspurt’. When David Hare’s trilogy was playing next door, Campbell mischievously gathered his three shows together under the heading of ‘The Bald Trilogy’. They grew out of Ken’s extraordinary range of interests, from his hero, Jackie Chan, to the Cathars, from trepanning to the fact that, according to Ken, the South Pacific people of Vanuatu worship Prince Philip. ‘I’m not mad: I’ve just read different books!’ was the spot on title for a later piece.
Ken first came to notice with his road show in the early 1970s, a collection of bar-room tales and ghost stories in which the likes of Bob Hoskins, Chris Langham and Sylvester McCoy travelled round pubs, putting nails up their noses or, in the case of McCoy, ferrets down their trousers. There was a fashion at the time for playing in factories and pubs but few people knew how to create a show that could survive in such venues. Campbell was the exception. His company could take care of themselves in any venue. He brought the road show to Manchester University when I was a student there. Unusually, he was booked to perform in the University Theatre. But the actors arrived just as a sit-in had started in the university’s administrative block and they quickly decided to abandon the theatre and give a free performance inside the occupied building instead. Later, several of the students were so inspired by what they saw that they put on their own daily show.
Eyre first took an interest in Ken when he was running the Nottingham Playhouse. Ken was commissioned to write two shows. ‘Bendigo’ was about a local prize fighter, who trained by spitting into people’s beer. Unsurprisingly, the people got angry and Bendigo got his fight. Later, ‘Walking like Geoffrey’ was about a local village that discovered some time in the middle ages that if they were declared insane they would be exempt form the poll tax. ‘The evening,’ Eyre wrote in ‘Utopia and Other Places’, ‘reached its climax in a mass demonstration of eccentric walking from the school of Max Wall for the benefit of the taxman’. Eyre also describes Ken’s directorial style, which once involved him pinning an actor against the wall and shouting ‘Act proper!’
Later when I was working in Nottingham, Eyre cast Ken and his colleagues as the fairground people in Ben Jonson’s ‘Bartholomew Fair’. As the visitors to the fair were played by more conventional actors, there was a huge and appropriate gulf between the two worlds. At the end of the season when the permanent company was breaking up, I moaned to Ken that it would be boring for those of us left behind when everyone else had gone. Not a bit of, he said, going on to suggest that I join the local flying club because it was good to discover new worlds and the pilots must be - and here he dragged the words out with his typical nasal whine - ‘very interesting people to know’. I don’t know whether he followed this advice himself. The thought of him in charge of a plane doesn’t bear thinking about.
In addition to the voice, journalists loved describing his bulging eyes, his wild eyebrows, and his habit of leaning towards you to make sure you understood what he was saying. I went to see him at Stamford Hill before he moved to Epping Forest. He didn’t really answer any of my questions but he did give me a private performance in his front room and when I left he said it was very sporting of me to come.
Ken died suddenly in August 08 at the age of 66. He’s probably currently teaching the inhabitants of another time zone how to speak pidgin English. But he’s left a huge, oddly-shaped hole here that won’t be filled any time soon.
'Beyond our Ken: The Multiverse of Ken Campbell'
Olivier Theatre, 12 October at 7.30pm (2hours 20 minutes); £5/£4
Add your comment