Ken Campbell; GREAT Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Offbeat actor, director and producer, he was an original
talent in British theatre for nearly 50 years
Michael Coveney
The Guardian,
Tuesday September 2 2008
Ken Campbell, who has died suddenly aged 66, was one of the
most original and unclassifiable talents in the British
theatre of the past half century. He was a writer, director
and unique monologist, a genius at both producing shows on a
shoestring and inculcating the improvisational capabilities
of the actors who were brave enough to work with him.
An Essex boy who trained at Rada, he never joined the
establishment, though his 1976 play Illuminatus! (co-written
with actor Chris Langham) - an eight-hour epic based on an
American sci-fi trilogy - was the first production in the
National Theatre's Cottesloe auditorium, with a prologue
spoken by John Gielgud. And his official posts included a
brief spell as artistic director of the Liverpool Everyman
in 1980 and a professorship in ventriloquism at Rada.
He was first renowned in the early 1970s for the Ken
Campbell Road Show, in which a company including Bob
Hoskins, Jane Wood, Andy Andrews, Dave Hill and Sylvester
McCoy ("The Human Bomb") enacted bar-room tales of sexual
and psychic mayhem while banging nails up their noses and
stuffing ferrets down their trousers.
Even more remarkable than Illuminatus! was a 10-play
(22-hour) hippy extravaganza, The Warp (1979), a sort of
acid Archers co-written with the poet Neil Oram in which the
protagonist's search for his own female consciousness took
him from 15th-century Bavaria to a flying saucer conference
in 1968. The cast of unknowns included Bill Nighy and 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.
The Warp, which has been successfully revived as a "rave"
production near London Bridge by Ken's daughter, Daisy
Campbell, was followed, in 1980, with a magnificent hoax
which seemed to encapsulate the challenge of "what next?"
The theatre world was flooded with invitations from Trevor
Nunn to come aboard the newly formed Royal Dickens Company
in the wake of the RSC's successful Nicholas Nickleby;
Shakespeare was being dropped for Dickens, and offers were
made on meticulously reproduced company notepaper, all
apparently signed by Nunn - "Love, Trev".
Nunn's embarrassment was compounded by the fact that a lot
of people had written back to him refusing, or even more
disconcertingly, accepting his gushing "offers" of work on
Snoo Wilson's Little Dorrit or Michael Bogdanov's equally
specious Sketches by Boz. After a couple of weeks of panic
and speculation in the press, Campbell owned up.
There have been few stranger people in Britain, let alone
the theatre, than Campbell. Living in a Swiss chalet in
Epping Forest, he trained his three black crossbreed dogs,
Max, Gertie and Bear, to win prizes, made art work from the
random droppings of a parrot called Doris and entertained
his visitors with the films of Jackie Chan, the martial arts
movie star whom he regarded as the greatest living actor.
This irrepressibly jovial elf, with a thin streak of
malicious devilry about him - he was Puck, hobgoblin - was,
in recent years, most widely known for his own wild and
wonderful one-man shows, which embodied the quality of
"friskajolly younkerkins" that Kenneth Tynan, quoting the
Tudor poet John Skelton, ascribed to Ralph Richardson's
famous postwar Falstaff. He gave up "serious" acting when he
realised he was enjoying what everyone else was doing too
much, although he did appear in a take-over cast in Yasmina
Reza's Art at the Wyndham's Theatre in 2000.
On television he appeared memorably as a bent lawyer in GF
Newman's Law and Order series (1978) and also in one episode
of Fawlty Towers and as Warren Mitchell's neighbour, Fred
Johnson, in the sitcom In Sickness and in Health. He popped
up bizarrely in films such as A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and
Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), very much the same
persona, bursting at the confines of a role and never quite
fitting another scheme of showbusiness.
With a gimlet eye and a pair of bushy eyebrows that had
lately outgrown even Denis Healey's and acquired advanced
canopy status, Campbell was 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.
When Richard Eyre presented Campbell's Bendigo, a raucous
vaudeville about a legendary prizefighter, at the Nottingham
Playhouse in 1976, he thought it was one of the most
enjoyable things he had ever seen in a theatre (so did I).
"Most of Campbell's capers," said Eyre, "look as if they are
going to be follies and turn out to be inspired gestures of
showmanship."
Campbell had pursued improvisation as a goal in itself in
recent years, and had just returned from the Edinburgh
Festival Fringe, where he supervised the fleshing out in
performance of shows that had no existence whatsoever except
in the columns of fictitious reviews written by critics on
national newspapers.
I saw an example of this style of riotous work in Cambridge
in 2005, when I watched Campbell conduct an inspired
improvisational contest in the English faculty between a
group of undergraduates and a quartet of visiting
Liverpudlian actors. In a sort of Whose Line Is It Anyway?
format, Campbell set the tasks, or took suggestions from the
audience. We had cod Shakespeare, the Eurovision Song
Contest, enemies seeing each other in a museum, simultaneous
singing and "German" acting.
Campbell was born in Ilford, Essex, the only son of Colin
Campbell, a Liverpudlian Irishman who worked for ITT, the
commercial cable company, and his wife Elsie. He was
educated at Gearies primary school, in Barkingside, and
Chigwell school. While at Rada he also appeared with the
renowned Renegades, an amateur group in Ilford run by one of
Campbell's earliest heroes, James Cooper, the son of a
Barking brush salesman who ran the company, played the
leading roles, painted the sets, manned the box office and
talked a lot about Noël Coward.
He was hired by the comedian Dick Emery as his stooge on
tour and had a pot of coffee tipped into his lap for daring
to gain an unscripted laugh. "I'm the comedian around here,"
said an incensed Emery, as he poured it. In 1964 he was
understudying Warren Mitchell in the West End and showed him
a script called Events of an Average Bath Night. Mitchell
arranged for a performance, in which he appeared, at Rada.
This started Campbell off as playwright, and his Old King
Cole (1967) for Peter Cheeseman, another early champion, at
Stoke has proved a children's classic.
A chance encounter with Lindsay Anderson led to his key,
reactive association with the Royal Court in 1969. He tasted
failure as a junior director and decided to change tack
completely. He heard that a benefactor at the Bolton Octagon
was sponsoring a small "road show" team to spread the good
word of the theatre locally. He put in for the job, got it,
then broke away from the Octagon. The Road Show brought him
back to the Court (Anderson invited them into the Theatre
Upstairs) and established his place on the fringe at the
first peak of its creativity in the early 1970s.
With another eccentric self-dramatiser, Ion Alexis Will,
Campbell wrote The Great Caper (1974), about a search across
Europe and the Lapland tundra for the perfect woman. The
practitioners he now most admired were not the career
directors of the day but the liberated, liberating American
companies like the Living Theatre, who had appeared at the
Roundhouse, and the improvisational group Theatre Machine,
whose work was based on the teaching of Keith Johnstone, an
assistant director at the Court.
When Eyre took over the Nottingham Playhouse, Campbell wrote
not only Bendigo but also Walking Like Geoffrey, an inspired
piece of vaudevillian hokum based on the local legend of
people disporting themselves in a lunatic fashion in order
to avoid paying taxes. Eyre also cast Campbell as Knock'em
the horse-courser in Bartholomew Fair and Subtle in The
Alchemist; never was an actor more perfectly equipped for
the wild excesses and linguistic relish in rare Ben Jonson.
By the end of the 1980s, Campbell's interests in trepanning,
teleportation, synchronicity and the Jungian concept of
archetypes were fuelling a new career as a solo artist,
stitched into a dizzyingly seductive form of theatrical
monologue that he delivered in his trademark nasal whine,
rocking dangerously on the balls of his feet.
Campbell's three monodramas - Recollections of a Furtive
Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu at the National in 1993 -
were subtitled The Bald Trilogy because the David Hare
trilogy was playing next door in the larger Olivier
auditorium. They contain some of the most exciting and
entertaining writing for the stage in the past 30 years, on
a par with many sections of The Warp, and they won the
Evening Standard best comedy award.
He was gloriously on form again in I'm Not Mad: I've Just
Read Different Books! (2005), a multiple adventure of some
time-travelling cave-dwellers near Turin, a visit to Jeremy
Beadle's library, his career as a speaker at pet funerals in
Ilford, and a demonstration of real "gastromantic" acting
(this involves a lot of arse, as opposed to voice,
projection; what Judi Dench does, apparently, is merely
"dramatic portrayal"). His heroes included the sci-fi writer
Philip K Dick, the Hollywood script fixer Robert McKee and
Ken Dodd. His enthusiasms were legion and unshakeable; a
maniacal telephone call in the small hours was both a dread
and a joy for many of his friends.
Campbell met his wife, the actor Prunella Gee, when she
appeared in Illuminatus! They married in 1978, and although
they divorced, they remained close. He is survived by Gee,
their daughter Daisy, a writer and director, and two
grandchildren, Dixie and Django.
· Ken Campbell, writer, director and actor, born December 10
1941; died August 31 2008
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:usWdnQCEXIt8AyHV...@rcn.net...
> Ken Campbell
> Offbeat actor, director and producer, he was an original
> talent in British theatre for nearly 50 years
>
> Michael Coveney
> The Guardian,
> Tuesday September 2 2008
>
>
Iain Sinclair writes about him in London Orbital:
"Sit down with Campbell at an outside table and you are in
company with a Ben Jonson clown, a whirlwind of cataclysmic
energy; you realise, caught by that stare, those white
bottletop eyes that the man is stonecold sane. He talks
tickertape but his argument is rehearsed and organised;
years of improvised performances, multilayered monologues,
have honed his pitch. Fast as morse -- but intelligible if
you give yourself up to him...he takes his role of spirit of
place very seriously."