Ken Campbell, The elf of Epping Forest; article
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As actor, entertainer, playwright and iconoclast, Ken Campbell has
been renowned as the madcap genius of British drama. He talks to
Michael Coveney about life on and beyond the fringe
Saturday November 26, 2005
The Guardian
'Dizzyingly seductive form of theatrical monologue' ... Ken Campbell.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe (snip)
There are few stranger people in Britain, let alone the theatre, than
Ken Campbell. He cites only two of his recreations in Who's Who: dog
agility and ventriloquism. No mention of his obsession with the
science fiction books of Philip K Dick, or the films of Jackie Chan,
the martial arts film star (whom he regards as the greatest living
actor), or his extraordinary art work made from the random droppings
and feathers of his pet parrot, Doris. Yet this 63-year-old jovial
elf, with a streak of malicious devilry about him, is widely
acknowledged to be a madcap genius.
First renowned for the Ken Campbell Road Show, in which a company
including Bob Hoskins, Dave Hill, Jane Wood and Sylvester McCoy ("The
Human Bomb") enacted bar room tales of sexual and psychic mayhem,
Campbell produced two of the most remarkable epics of the 1970s: the
five-play (eight hours) Illuminatus! based on an American sci-fi
trilogy which opened the National Theatre's Cottesloe auditorium (the
prologue spoken by John Gielgud); and the 10-play (22 hours) hippie
extravaganza, The Warp, a sort of acid Archers in which the
protagonist's search for his own female consciousness took him from
15th-century Bavaria to a flying saucer conference in 1968.
While many of his collaborators have moved on, Campbell remains, even
in the odd cameo appearance on television (he was in one episode of
Fawlty Towers and played Warren Mitchell's neighbour, Fred Johnson, in
In Sickness and in Health) and in films (A Fish Called Wanda, Derek
Jarman's The Tempest), very much the same as he was. He's unalterable,
incorrigible.
"There's a side of my life now," he says, "where what makes my time
pass most happily is encouraging young folk to have a good time in
show business." Lately, he has been conducting improvisational
contests, held on the first Thursday of every month at the Inn on the
Green, Ladbroke Grove, under London's Westway flyover. On December 17
he will host Britain's first "Improvathon" for 36 uninterrupted hours.
With a gimlet eye and a pair of bushy eyebrows that have lately
acquired advanced canopy status, Campbell is a perennial reminder of
the rough-house origins of the best of British theatre, from
Shakespeare, music hall and Joan Littlewood to the fringe before it
became fashionable, tame and subsidised. He's the non-thinking man's
Peter Brook, with no time for piety or the awed approval of his peers.
Quite early on, he cheerfully admits, the British theatre decided he
didn't belong in the hierarchy, though one or two key figures, like
the directors Lindsay Anderson and Richard Eyre, were always fans.
When Eyre presented Campbell's Bendigo, a raucous vaudeville about a
legendary prize fighter, at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1976, he
thought it was one of the most enjoyable things he had ever seen in a
theatre. "Most of Campbell's capers," says Eyre, "look as if they are
going to be follies and turn out to be inspired gestures of
showmanship."
Campbell lives in a bizarre Swiss chalet with his two dogs and parrot
on the edge of Epping Forest near High Beech. He is not really someone
you associate with bricks and mortar, more with sheds, vans and
communes. His current home sits on the exact site, he says, of a
woodman's hut where Roman Catholic clergy hid during the dissolution
of the monasteries under Henry VIII.
It is paradise for his dogs, Max and Gertie (as in Max Miller and
Gertie Lawrence) and he moved here from his last abode in Stamford
Hill chiefly on Max's account. Max was going to be put down because he
bit a policeman. Campbell had six months before the court case in
which to try everything he knew to save the dog. "I signed him up with
a heavy duty dog training place in Brentwood and they helped me train
him until he won a cup! So I took all these rosettes and pleaded
guilty." The magistrate then asked Campbell's solicitor why Max should
have bitten Mr Davies, the policeman neighbour. The solicitor said
that maybe the dog thought he was an enemy of Mr Campbell. "Why should
he have thought that?" "He is a policeman, ma'am." The magistrate
permitted Max his life.
Incongruously seated in the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar in Loughton High
Street, Campbell suddenly says that his old dad would be proud of him
living at the other end of the 167 bus route. In one sense, Campbell
has travelled far; in another hardly at all. His father was a
Liverpudlian Irishman who worked for ITT, the commercial cable
company. When posted to the London office, he met his wife, Ken's
mother, in Ilford; she died, Ken says, "when I was about 12".
By then he had passed the 11-plus and been accepted for the fee-paying
public school at Chigwell (his father didn't have to pay; his income
was small, so Campbell was a lucky scholarship boy). He went to RADA
and set about his task as a repertory actor in the early 1960s. He was
hired by the comedian Dick Emery as his stooge on tour and had a pot
of coffee poured into his lap for daring to gain an unscripted laugh.
"I'm the comedian," said an incensed Emery. Then Campbell was director
of the Bournemouth Aqua Show - "It was really terrific, with stunt
divers and aqua-lovelies, but I was in charge of the shallow end
acting bit."
In 1964 he was understudying Warren Mitchell in a West End flop called
Everybody Loves Opal. He showed Mitchell a script called Events of an
Average Bath Night. Mitchell liked it and arranged for a performance,
in which he appeared, at RADA. This launched Campbell as playwright.
An encounter with Lindsay Anderson on a train led to his key, reactive
association with the Royal Court in 1969. He wrote a play about Jack
Sheppard, the highwayman, "bearing in mind what Lindsay had told me
about Brecht; I didn't get it, but his explanation was very
inspiring". When the play was at the Mermaid Theatre, he invited
Anderson along to see it and said, "There, is that what you meant?"
Anderson said no, it wasn't, but invited him to join the Royal Court
as a junior director. Campbell suffered the indignity of his first
show being taken over by Anderson himself, so he decided to change
direction completely and founded the Road Show at the Bolton Octagon.
The Road Show brought him back to the Court and established his place
on the fringe at the peak of its creativity in the early 1970s. With
another eccentric, Ion Alexis Will, he wrote The Great Caper, about a
search across Europe and the Lapland tundra for the Perfect Woman. The
practitioners he now most admired were the wild American companies
like the Living Theatre, who had appeared at the Round House, and the
improvisational group Theatre Machine whose work was based on the
teaching of Keith Johnstone, another assistant director at the Court.
And he was upping the stakes. Illuminatus! was an orgiastic feat of
stunt, fable and conspiracy performed, at first, in an old warehouse
in Liverpool. At the first all-day Sunday performance, Richard Eyre
humped scenery around; Brian Aldiss, the novelist, regaled the
audience with his learning in the endless intervals; and Chris Langham
as an investigative reporter masturbated in a Texas cell before being
transported by a fleshy guerrilla (Prunella Gee) to a yellow submarine
commanded by one Hagbard Celine ("I'm the 20th-century Leonardo -
except that I'm not gay!") dedicated to the overthrow of the
conspiratorial Illuminati.
Prunella Gee was an unlikely partner for Campbell, but they soon
became inseparable. Gee's background was resolutely upper middle class
and she was best known for playing busty, decorative blondes in West
End farces and television comedy series. They married and set up home
in Haverstock Hill, North London, after Gee became pregnant with their
daughter, Daisy. Although they split up when Daisy was five, they
remain on good terms.
Just as The Great Caper was a thinly disguised autobiographical story
of Ion Alexis Will (played on stage by Warren Mitchell), so The Warp
was the personal saga of the poet and painter Neil Oram, who still
lives on a commune near Loch Ness in Scotland. There were 18 and a
half hours of theatre, two one-hour meal breaks and a half-hour beer,
sausage and coffee interval at 2.35 am. The cast included an unknown
Bill Nighy, an equally unknown Jim Broadbent, Turkish policemen,
Chinese officials, Buckminster Fuller, clowns, fire-eaters, military
art enthusiasts, a raging landlord ("I don't have any friends; just
different classes of enemy") and a comic postman.
By the end of the next decade, Campbell's interests in trepanning,
teleportation, synchronicity and Jungian archetypes were fuelling a
new career as a solo artist, stitched into a dizzyingly seductive form
of theatrical monologue that he delivers in his trademark nasal whine,
like an Estuary Bob Dylan. He draws (and elaborates) on his private
life, his fantasies and the detailed topography of Ilford, the River
Lea and Walthamstow Marshes - with diversions to such exotic locations
as Stoke-on-Trent, Paddington, Newfoundland and the sand dunes in
Croyde, Devon. In Campbell, ordinary meets alternative life-style to
an unprecedented degree, as if John Betjeman had mated with Spalding
Gray.
Not content with itemising his autobiography on stage, Campbell is
currently engaged in teaching Doris the parrot her own. So far, he
says, she can say, "'I used to be an egg and then I hatched out,
didn't I? All fluffy at first, then the feathers' ... she's working on
the next bit now." Sometimes, though, Doris comes out with unexpected
bits of her own, such as "I'm up 'ere, you're down there ... shall I
do my silly noises? I think I will ... whoops!" And as her limited
repertoire also includes a formidable impression of the telephone,
Campbell can't answer it for a while whenever it rings "because it's
probably only her. She does three rings, then says "Ello!' like me.
Parrots live for ever and she's nowhere near 10 yet, so she'll live
way after me. At least I know my voice will carry on for a bit after
I'm gone: 'I'm up 'ere, you're down there!'"
(unquote)