If somebody was as late to a party as I am to Jack Holden’s tour de force solo(ish) show KENREX then they would have got the year of the party wrong. The show debuted to great acclaim in Sheffield in late 2024, and had two hugely successful London runs last year, and finally I caught it two weeks before the end of the second. Sorry everyone!
Anyway, it turns out it’s very good. Teetering on a guilty pleasure, but in an extremely classy way, and entirely intentionally. It caps a fairly remarkable few years for Holden, whose star has risen as a writer and a performer in more or less equal measures since his previous solo show Cruise was a West End hit post-pandemic hit.
Co-written with director Ed Stambollouian, it’s a largely true account of the brutal life and unusual death of one Ken Rex McElroy. That is to say it’s true crime, and Holden and Stambollouian are entirely transparent about the fact that they’ve been heavily influenced by true-crime podcasts. While KENREX isn’t trying to emulate the format, there is the sense that it basically has the same priorities, guiding us through a remarkably juicy true story with the pacing and narrative strategy of a podcast series. And maybe this lets it off the hook a little for not trying to get beneath its characters’ surfaces very much – it’s a yarn first and foremost.
Not that it’s not theatrical: indeed, presentationally it doesn’t get much more theatrical than this. Holden plays every single role, taking on virtually the entire populace of the sleepy Missouri town Skidmore and beyond as he regales us with the story of McElroy, a sort of village bastard who menaced his fellow citizens in a remarkable number of ways – ranging from cattle rustling to attempted murder. But he always got off thanks to the efforts of his infuriating lawyer, Richard Gene McFadin. Until, one day, he didn’t get off: as we find out early on, McElroy was murdered in public, in front of dozens of townsfolk. But no witnesses ever came forward, and no conviction has ever been made.
Holden conjures his cast with increasingly sweaty aplomb, but Stambollouian’s production is defined by imagination as much as perspiration. From a delirious song and dance routine to illustrate the town’s annual festival to an ominous showdown between McElroy and a circle of mic stands, KENREX never simply rests on the laurels of the sheer effort Holden is putting in. Although that is incredible: seemingly inexhaustible he’s so prodigiously physically and facially malleable that after two hours I think I was less certain what he looked like than when he walked on. And Holden is not in fact alone on stage: he’s backed up by musician and composer John Patrick Elliott, whose contributions range from subtle drones to full on sung songs to properly apocalyptic soundscapes, with a little acting tossed in for good measure.
It’s incredibly impressive, to the extent that you can be a little forgiving over its relative lack of depth. There are some efforts made to counter the very obvious conclusion that McElroy was merely a terrible human being who got what he deserved. But this isn’t handled convincingly: it all happens too late on. Although we do get some of the inner turmoil of prosecutor David Baird – the man who wanted to take McElroy down legally –, nobody else has any real depth, especially McElroy, who truly seems awful.
It’s a phenomenal staging of a play, more luridly entertaining than deeply profound. But the key thing is, that’s exactly what it wants to be - on its own terms, KENREX is an absolute triumph.