Ian Shuttleworth's Ken Campbell Reviews

Here are some reviews from my chum Ian Shuttleworth, from various publications. Some are from the Financial Times where Ian is the theatre critic.

From CITY LIMITS, January 1991

Anybody who has shoved a rotting prawn down Jim Davidson's throat is clearly on the side of the angels. But that moment (in Peter Greenaways "A Zed And Two Noughts") is among the lesser achievements of Britain's premier theatrical fruitcake Ken Campbell. After the surreal ground- breaking of the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool in the 1970s (staging "Illuminatus!" at the National Theatre and the 22-hour marathon "The Warp") and the psychotic wackiness of his Roadshow, Campbell now prefers the intimacy of solo rambles through his autobiographical undergrowth.

His latest undertaking "Furtive Nudist" (at the Riverside Studios from January 10th) was first aired on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1989; in the interim it was translated and adapted for a production in Munich, and according to Campbell, "when I returned here and was performing it, I'd get to certain bits and think, 'Hang on, Rufus Beck [in Germany] had a better version here,' and the whole piece started to live again as new doors of my own opened back onto it."

He maintains that most of the weird events recounted in "Furtive Nudist" are true, "though when it came to a choice between being honourable to exactly what happened and entertaining an audience I'd choose the entertaining option. But a story is a much bigger thing than just reminiscence... I was told!" If his stories are to be believed, Campbell exerts an unconscious magnetic attraction upon oddballs of every description; indeed, he's given many luminaries of fringe theatre their first exposure, among them Jim Broadbent, Sylveste (as he then was) McCoy, Chris Langham and the late David Rappaport (all in "Illuminatus!") - and can also boast that "John Alderton met Pauline Collins in my first television play." His own off-the-wall credentials are impressive; legend has it he once auditioned for the RSC by doing a card trick - with raw sausages. ("Pick a sausage, any sausage...")

Ken Campbell's play for children "Old King Cole" has been staged over the holidays by the London Bubble at Peckham. "When that was written in 1967," he remembers, "most Christmas plays were based on Hans Andersen or the Grimms, so I thought, 'Well, why not set it in the world of the Beano or the Dandy?'" It's been produced all over the world - "I once met a South African girl in the box office of the National Film Theatre who recognised the name on my credit card and told me she'd played drippy Princess Daphne in Johannesburg!" But once again the German connection is strong, and most of his work for children is performed much more often in Germany than in Britain: "My 'Old King Cole''s better known there than the nursery rhyme - they call it 'Fazz and Twoo' there, though, and spell Fazz with two zeds to avoid confusion with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 'Skungpoomery' does get performed here, but seemingly only in school dormitories..."

The Great British public will probably know Campbell best as Alf Garnett's neighbour Fred Johnson in "In Sickness And In Health" ("though I think they've just axed it"), but he enjoys his one-man presentations most. "I'd rather stick with them than the epics - I don't know that I have access to the great enthusiasts and enthusiasm any more for epics. Some have died, some have gone mad, some have become millionaires..." Thankfully, he shows no willingness to settle into a mainstream rut; that's the shrimp's way out.

IAN SHUTTLEWORTH

From LIVE (house magazine of Battersea Arts Centre), December 1993

I had got vaccinated just before meeting the perpetrators of Beauty And The Beast - and a bloody good thing too, whatever it is they've got might be infectious. Introductions are barely out of the way before Ken Campbell decides to share news of one of the characters from his "Furtive Nudist" monologue: "I got a postcard from the Prophet the other day; it seems he's now chief throat-slitter to the Ivory Coast religion that spawned voodoo."

Our conversation has a habit of lurching off the path into various clumps of bizarre undergrowth. Chris Lynam begins a digression about his Lord Byron show when Ken gets inspired: "I think you should do 'Chris Lynam is all the poets' - some are tough, some are soppy, some are French." Chris: "I bet there'd be lots of wine involved." Ken: "Oh yeah, Dylan Thomas would be a good one - you could do your wrecking-the- cupboard act for him." Or Chris, trying to remember the hosts of a television programme he appeared on: "Muriel Gray and... what's that bloke's name?" Ken: "Michael Denison." Chris: "No, Jimmy Mulville." In the end you just give up and go with the flow.

Look, basic information: "Beauty And The Beast". BAC Christmas show. Director Ken Campbell: Britain's premier theatrical fruitcake, star of "In Sickness And In Health" and "Brookside", fresh from runs at the National and the Riverside of his trilogy of monologues "Furtive Nudist", "Pigspurt!" and "Jamais Vu". Beast Chris Lynam: clown to Royal tours and Dylan gigs (Bob, not Thomas; no wrecked cupboards there), doomed to being forever remembered for his former trademark banger up the bum. Beauty Kate McKenzie: singer of opera and cabaret, erstwhile Kray Sister and frequent collaborator with Lynam in all walks of life. (Chris: "The press don't want to know that we're romantically involved, it gets in the way of things." Kate: "It's no big deal; we're together, we work together.") Right, that's out of the way. Now: cut to the chase.

So what's it, erm, about then? Chris: "A night out for the folks - that's what theatre is, isn't it?" Kate: "It's moving away from cabaret and doing more theatrical stuff; there are lots of unpleasant things in there that we just wanted to do, nasty bits as well as some hopefully beautiful things."

Yes, but what's it about? Trust me to open up a can of worms - Chris: "Ken's got the whole show written down..." Ken: "Quite early on Chris will be putting his disgusting teeth in and explaining to the audience why he doesn't like them. Then a thrash metal song with a songsheet, a passionate film noir, a chase, then a pizzazzy showbiz number, a girl from the audience will disappear into the skies, a mermaid ballet and that'll wrap up the first half. Russian acrobats, a plank routine, grotesque balloon modelling [relishing the word "grotesque"], a violent Christmas day domestic scene..." Chris: "That's yer panto business..." Ken: "A rather touching Kurt Weill piece..." Kate: "...then some romance at the end." Well, glad that's sorted out.

It's a strange but enjoyable performer-director relationship, says Ken. "They've never had a director before and don't really want one, so it's a matter of seeing how it's going and commenting in a sealed envelope which could be opened if required at the right moment. It's like... they do the Christmas tree, and if I happen to have in my box some baubles I can give them, they can hang 'em on if they want." After a quick discussion of the pivotal role of cardboard boxes in abstract humour, Chris recalls his previous encounters with Ken, notably on legendary 22-hour science-fiction epic "The Warp", "one of the most extraordinary theatrical achievements at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival ever", which in turn spawns a digression - Ken: "Were you in the Liverpool one?" Chris: "No, that was the only one I wasn't in." Ken: "Oh yeah, the one where they got paid." Chris: "Wasn't the German one a bit of money as well?" Ken: "It was Ł10 and as much as you could eat, drink and smoke" - anyway, says Chris, "I never got directed by Ken, ever; I think the only comment I ever got from him was 'That's a peculiar way of acting...'!"

Chris and Kate's joint stage work has been largely musical, but "the bands we got together were always very theatrical," explains Kate. Does she see herself as tempering Chris's wildness onstage? "Not at all; I've got nothing to do with him!" Chris: "It does make the work slightly more palatable having Kate onstage." Kate: "Well, it offers an alternative. I think I sometimes express how the audience feel; we have one number where I kick him and pull his hair, and they like that, when I stick the boot in."

Out of the blue, Ken offers: "I've been inspired in the last couple of days by reading Bob Monkhouse's autobiography. It's got lots of great bits that I never expected to be riveted by, like a history of 'The Golden Shot'. And he was writing pornographic novels for the forces when he was 13, in class. I now suppose that I'd always been a fan of Bob Monkhouse, and it can't be true. I would hope this show would be just sprinkled a wee bit with the genius of Monkhouse."

This man is undoubtedly an expert; I'm just not quite sure what at. After all, it was Ken who introduced the world to Jim Broadbent, Sylvester McCoy and the late David Rappaport among others, with his surreal Roadshow in the '70s. Whoops, here we go again with a stream of reminiscences about setting McCoy's head on fire in an incinerator, and the unpredictable trick where "The thing to do was get the toy train to leave the viaduct just right so it speared down into his knackers." Chris: "Funnily enough, that's the sort of thing I started off doing in showbusiness when I was 13: sword-swallowing, sticking nails up your nose, walking up razor-sharp ladders and blowing fire. I met these RAF blokes in my school holidays - it was their month off, they were doing this act and they wanted an assistant for afternoon shows."

All right, so you don't know any more about Beauty And The Beast, but you've got an idea of the region it'll be coming from: Out There, somewhere. Bound to be worth seeing... but maybe you shouldn't sit too near the stage, just in case they end up doing the rap song with ignited farts. You never know.

IAN SHUTTLEWORTH

Transcript of interview with Ken Campbell, conducted 8/12/1994

This interview formed the basis of a feature published in the FINANCIAL TIMES later that month.

NOTE: Because it's a bastard to punctuate Ken's outpourings, I've here adopted the convention he uses in the published versions of his solo shows - lots of dashes.

[There's a plaster flying-pig plaque by the front door; set paintings throughout the house; a gigantic John Birt looks on the interview ("Well, I have a set of darts..."). One of the foam sculptures from "Mystery Bruises", books piled on the floor: I Ching, Brewer's... Videos: Thriller, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Bugsy Malone, Fort Apache. he reports that he's just back from a quantum conference, invited up by David Deutsch.]

[I remark that I never got to see "Knocked Sideways", knowing that this will set him off on a roller-coaster precis of it:] It's about my dog Werner, a black and white mongrel - She was called Werner because of Tina Packer - What happened was a bunch of kids were - Well, to really tell you what happened -

I'd done the Werner Erhard est training, and man! I thought it was astounding! - They were brilliant, these guys; they made an old colonel cry! - It was a trip, I thought - Some people became what they call est-holes at the end of it - Couldn't do anything with their lives except run round giving out leaflets - And I didn't fancy that - But I fancied having my own of some sort - I thought you could do a comedy one called Jest - And for the logo I made the J out of a ferret.

Quite a few est graduates came, including Tina Packer, who was the one who'd insisted I go on the est thing - It was at the moment where we were doing hysteria sensitivity training - Which consists of one person with a bag on their head recalling a time when they went hysterical with laughter - But they're not allowed to tell you what happened, only every attendant detail - "It was a hot day, it was 19-thing, it was in the Tottenham High Street..." whatever - And everyone sitting around in a circle with their knees and elbows touching each other - And in the middle of that there was a knock on the door - And it was these little kids who'd all got puppies down their shirts - They'd saved a whole load of puppies from drowning in the canal - And their mum had said, "No, you can't have nine puppies, not with your Auntie Margaret coming," - And they were just knocking on doors seeing if anyone would take them off them - So I said, "Well, there's quite a few people in here, come in," - And there's about 15 people on my Jest humour workshop all sitting round in a circle touching their elbows and knees and one with a bag over her head - And these little kids, about 7,8, were quite street-cred, thought, "Well, bunch of adults sitting around with their knees touching, nothing to us" - And I said, "These kids have just saved some puppies from drowning..." - D'you know, none of them took one? - So I said, "Which is the best one?" - They said, "What d'you think of that one?" - I said, "All right, you can leave that one here" - Then Tina Packer at the end of the thing said, "That was a very irresponsible thing to do - Firstly answering the door was wrong, because the workshop was going quite well till the puppy came, then the whole thing was sort of arsing around with the dog" - I think she'd really hoped it would go well and she was gonna join the Jest outfit right at the top, but I'd blown it by bringing this puppy in - "And you won't look after it" - I said, "Bloody hell, Tina, how d'you know?" - And she said, "What're you gonna call it?" - And I said, "Werner." - She looked shocked, she said, "You can't, it's a bitch" - And I said, "Well, I'm gonna" - So there it was saddled with this name, and I had to look after it incredibly well for 19 years - All to annoy Tina Packer.

Then I compare the careers of Werner Erhard and Werner the dog - Find out the similarities and the contrasts - Werner Erhard was gonna save the world - He took personal responsibility for world hunger and was gonna get the whole thing sorted by 1999 - He's on the run now - It looks like he won't make it - But Werner the dog may have saved the world, we think, from the things she put into motion shortly after she died - I wrote a letter to Werner Erhard saying not to worry about that because Werner the dog may have sorted it out.

[He was about to perform all five of his solo shows on consecutive evenings at the Cockpit:] I've got a day to get each one together - "Jamais Vu"'s quite easy 'cause I've just been doing that, and I did "Mystery Bruises" yesterday, so they're all right - "Furtive Nudist" I've done so often I should think that's in my mind - "Pigspurt!"'ll be the one I'll have to really bone up on - "Knocked Sideways" I never knew anyway; I just did it one night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall - And I cheat - All my shows are now housed in one of those trolleys - I don't think I can be bothered to get the scenery out, so if I'm off to Liverpool or wherever I just go off with me trolley - [I double-checked; he did say "off with..."] - Otherwise I'd have to move my whole house there, and I don't think they want a lot of hassle - It's a sporting event, isn't it - "How much will he remember?" - There's talk of a competition where if you buy tickets for all five you go in a lottery and you might have dinner with me - As a kind of negative prize.

Next year they're gonna do the whole of the Bald Trilogy - It's a quintet now, they can't cope with you - Because I suddenly don't get writer's blocks any more, I get writer's flux - I'm really quite into the sixth; I've got an actual commission to write it from the National Theatre - I needed money to write the next one because I need to get around a bit - This one is about mystic geography - Which is a way of talking about people - Like you say about the people of Liverpool, they've got quite a well- developed America - You don't mean they've been there, but they think like it, sing like it, whatever - Well developed New York, certainly - And you could say, "He's a breezy chap, he's got a nice Amsterdam, that boy, but if he wants to marry my daughter he'd better sharpen his Berlins up" - It's like astrological talk - But you can get really rarefied - Say, "I think he's got an Andorra fighting to manifest here" - Another thing about mystic geography is sometimes out of the blue somebody will say something like, "You must go to Katmandu," or somewhere you'd never really thought of going - Well, I've got a few I have to follow up - If they say you've gotta go, you must go as soon as it is proper to do so, with mystic geography. This boat refugee girl said to me, "You've gotta go to Vietnam" - And I said to her, "You gotta go to Newfoundland." - She's a classical violinist - And I'm gonna pack her off first to learn proper jig and reel playing and to research Newfoundland humour. Newfoundland is my best gig, where my fans really are - It's a great place, especially in the winter when it's really Arctic - They run all the comedy shows in Newf', and the music is like Liverpool was.

[How did the whole solo rambling thing start?] Gillian Browne I knew from the rep in Stoke-on-Trent - She rang me up and said, "Susannah York's just let them down at the Offstage Downstairs, so I've told them you'll do something." - I said, "Bleedin' 'ell, when?" - "A couple of weeks' time; I told them you'd think of something. At least come and see them" - And [Offstage owners/managers] Alec and Buddy Dalton had had problems with me at the New End - Because I did this show there but neglected to tell them that it involved two enormous pigs - They couldn't be got out of the theatre during the run because they shrieked like fuck and woke the patients in the hospital opposite - And they said, "There's not gonna be pigs this time, are there?" - And all I could think of was that I'd do an evening of reminiscence and natter about things that had happened to me - So the following week I invited a bunch of people I knew, and they invited a bunch of people they knew, for a trial evening - Then Buddy said, "All right but you're gonna have to have a director, and it's gonna be Gillian." - So when Gillian asked me to run it through I said, "No, I think that's a private matter between me and an audience." - She bought that, but she said, "D'you know how you're gonna begin it?" - I said, "No," - She said, "Right. I'll sit here till you do." - Then it was, is there gonna be an interval?, did I know what I was gonna be doing just before the interval?... - It was a terrific way of directing - Also I went onto Robert McKee's storycraft course - Mostly for movies, but there's a moment where he says, "A story is a bigger thing than life itself, way beyond mere reminiscence" - So I thought, "Oh, well, I'd better make it a story, then" - And rejigged it and bunged a fib or two in so that it had a properly structured story - That was "Furtive Nudist", about '87, '88.

I think [the solo] might be coming to an end - I'm not sure whether I'll go past no. 6 - I've got a faint feeling it might be a bit different - A one-man show with some other people in it - Not a play, 'cause I'm no good at plays - But another sort of thing - P'raps; no promises 'ere.

[He did some time as straight man to Dick Emery on a tour:] "Two Dicks" or something, it was called, about '64 - I played Lord Boothby in a sketch - I was directly employed by Dick Emery himself, who wanted to do some sketches with other people - He could serve mash from nine foot! - There used to be a programme called "Table Talk" or something - And it would be Lord Boothby and a few other farts - And they'd have had dinner, and they were sort of having a coffee and brandy now and talking about issues of the day - And with our sketch there'd been a delay in the kitchens and we hadn't had the first course yet, but we were now on transmission, supposedly - And Dick Emery was really good at playing old men and came on as this ancient waiter - And the chat was scripted but we had to keep it going because he would always add one gag each performance, and that was always in - One night we were a bit pissed - And my scripted line was, "Ah yes, that reminds me of a story I once heard about a bishop..." - And I said, "He was sitting on a tube train with a load of choirboys" - And Dick Emery dropped his characterisation and said, "What was that, Ken? Well, what happened, then?" - It wasn't funny, it was just wicked - Oh man, was that agony! - That was first house - Second house I went on - Whack! he was there - "Yeah? You got a gag ready, have you?" - I said, "Yeah" - And he poured all the coffee into my lap and said, "I'm the comedian."

Then baths - I was director of the Bournemouth Aqua Show - Well, only of the shallow-end acting bit, which I had to script as well - That's the background to a TV script I've just written called "The Price Of A Cloud" for the BBC about putting on a water show - Kenith Trodd thought I'd write about what it was like in Bournemouth in 1965, but I've written about what it'd be like if you put one on now.

The writing took off when I was understudying Warren Mitchell in a flop called "Everybody Loves Opal" - I showed him a play I'd written for kids called "Events Of An Average Bath Night" - And he thought it was terrific - We put it on in the RADA theatre - They had a notion at the time of putting professional shows on there - And it didn't work - And that particularly didn't work, it was universally reviewed as crap - Then I wrote a number of TV plays within a year around '68, '70 or so, and they all got done - "Old King Cole", my notion was - At the time there was either Grimm and Hans Andersen adaptations or panto - And I couldn't think why you couldn't take the "Beano" and the "Dandy" as some sort of model and write something with that feel - "One Night I Danced With Mr Dalton" was a one-hour Armchair Theatre - That was where John Alderton first met Pauline Collins - "You See The Thing Is This" was a half-hour play [with? for?] Jack Shepherd - And I wrote a play for Bob Hoskins at Stoke-on-Trent called "Christopher P." - Then I worked for a bit at the Royal Court as a director - But the show I directed didn't look with a week to go as if it was gonna be that good - So Lindsay Anderson took it over and polished it up - He didn't put his name on it, which was quite nice of him - I was always a great friend and fan of Lindsay's - Thought he was terrific geezer, and fine company - It's so very attractive with these misanthropes, because it was always like you were an exception to the rest of mankind while you were with him.

Then there was the Roadshow - That lasted a couple of years - The first show was with Bob Hoskins, and was notable for being based on urban folk-myths - Vanishing grandmother, ghost hitch-hiker, all that stuff - And the second was notable for putting my ferrets down Sylvester McCoy's trousers - There used to be a line in it - "And you're prepared to put a ferret down your trousers here in Wigan tonight?" or wherever - And one time we heard ourselves saying, "And you're prepared to put a ferret down your trousers here in Jerusalem tonight?" - Man, that was fantastic, we'd really got somewhere! - Sylveste came as Bob was thinking of going - He [Bob] had so much talent - Could have been a great comic, you know like Jerry Lewis, Norman Wisdom, Abbott and Costello - You know, proper crap comedy he could've been king of - But he didn't want his career to go like that and decided to go and be gangsters - And he's been rather successful at it, so I can't knock the decision.

I'm on the case of a really exciting one now, this Vietnamese boat girl, 'cause she's funny - She's never really done any comedy work - But it's great when people don't actually know what you're meant to do - That was one of the great attractions for me of Sylveste McCoy - He was very talented but he hadn't actually done anything - So I experimented by telling him everything wrong - Like "Look, you're in the strong position there, you've got to fart around," telling him to upstage people - It was all right in my shows, but he got queried sometimes about the way he carried on in other people's shows.

Then the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool - 1976-80, till I ran the Everyman Theatre, and it carried on into it in a funny way because I did science-fiction shows there - The big ones were "Illuminatus!", which consisted of five separate dramas, and "The Warp" which consisted of ten - It got into the Guinness Book of Records for a time as the longest continuous play - Each play had a separate title, but they were so weird that nobody ever knew them - "The Winds Howling Through Tiflis" was one - I don't know why it was ever called that but I didn't want to look thick so I never asked - We also did this great opera called "The Strange Case Of Charles Dexter Ward" with Jonathan Hyde as Ward - Shit, he was sensational! - [Sings;] "I have discovered a cipher in Hutchinson's haaaand, and a letter from Curwen to Orrrrrrne!"

My problem always was there wasn't a great demand for things I was any use at.

[On Jim davidson and the prawn in "A Zed And two Noughts":] Oh, I didn't know I did that - I never did my lines in that - I was only there on days when I wasn't needed and got someone else's lines - There was one day that I really couldn't go to Rotterdam, and that was when they decided to do my scene so they did it without me - I didn't have much of a part anyway, but it was a lesser one by the time I hadn't done it - I found Jim Davidson a very likeable guy - The main joy of "A Zed And Two Noughts" was sitting around with Jim Davidson.

I've nicked a line out of Bob Monkhouse's autobiography for "Jamais Vu", except he's not talking about John Birt.

[On Chris Lynam's "Beauty And The Beast":] I didn't really have time to direct the Chris Lynam show, it did really take care of itself - I kept my name on that but can't take any responsibility good or bad for it - I think for Chris we ought to give the audience a hysteria sensitivity half-hour before they go in and it'd be all right.

I'm not really all that multi-talented actually - I can write a bit - I can direct, but I only really enjoy directing something that nobody else will - I don't wanna join the who-can-do-"The-Cherry-Orchard"-best? competition, because the answer is it wouldn't be me - I have been asked to do "Fungus The Bogeyman" as a musical sometime in the spring. ["Fungus" was staged as a musical by Coventry Belgrade the following May.]

[On "Reality On The Rocks":] It's three programmes of which the big sensations are in the third one - The first two are quite interesting, sort of like basic science that most people sort of know - Like the expanding universe - Time is curved - And listening to the echoes of the Big Bag through this gramophone 'orn thing in the Canary Islands - Then the visit to CERN, where they wang these molecules round this 27-km tube and create new kinds of matter, that's good - It's difficult to know quite what the form is with Stephen Hawking in the bits between filming him - Because they say to you, "Don't worry, because he's very happy just thinking" - But you get to feeling, "Well, he's thought a bit now, I suppose I should natter to him" - So I said, "That voice they've given you's rather good, it's got some humour in it" - And he said [impersonating Hawking's electronic voice-box:] "YES" - And I said, "...except when you say yes, they ought to give you the option of a campy yes or an ironic one" - And he went, "MAYBE" - The notion was I didn't know anything - Because I hadn't got a clue about proper science, I only knew about crank science - I never knew what quantum mechanics was, but it wasn't that difficult.

Robert McKee comes to see all my shows now - And he was saying, "What is all this nonsense about Kenneth Branagh?" - And I said I thought it was because he's gone against the code of the Kenneths - Because Kenneth in Celtic means "the handsome one" - And if you're saddled with that you've got to compensate in some way - Like you can behave like Kenneth Williams or Kenneth Connor - And not a lot of people know this, but I give elocution lessons - Ken Livingstone used to speak in a wonderful plummy voice - But I said [nasal whine], "I don't think you're gonna get very far talking like that, Ken" - and he hasn't looked back - But Kenneth Branagh's attempting to do it in posho, and people resent it.

One of my best productions was "Waiting For Godot" at the Young Vic - Frank Dunlop called me in because he wanted someone who was gonna take a new look at it - And I thought, "Well, how are you gonna do that?, you've done 'em as tramps and as clowns" - Then I said, "Well, how about as impressionists? - You have Estragon and Vladimir as a couple of impressionists, you know, doing a little bit of The Beatles or whoever while they were waiting" - Then he said, "Well, who's Pozzo?" - And I said "Well, he's another impressionist" - "Well, who's Lucky?" - And I said, "John Sessions!" - He can do impressions that change halfway through a sentence - And there's a bizarre number of references to tennis in Lucky's speech, and John was terrific at these references to McEnroe and whoever - And the Boy was a glue-sniffer, and we had Camilla Saunders improvising random piano at different times - But we had to get it word perfect or else the estate would have been down on us, insisting that you do every production poohily the same - And I directed it for three days then caught measles and couldn't be around for two and a half weeks - And by the time I got back they'd got the whole thing together and it was absolutely terrific - It's my opinion that late Beckett is bollocks cubed - There's a fella sells books on a market stall round by Swiss Cottage baths - And he knew I thought this, and he asked me to write my comments on a whole load of Beckett books he had and to sign them - So if it had, "This is utter bollocks - Ken Campbell" written in it he got an extra quid for it.

I do have an extraordinary following - It's getting very exciting - There's a whole party of psychiatrists who come from Bedlam - And people like that really send you stuff out of the archives - I get interesting mail these days - People know to write to me if the face of Our Lord's appeared in the spaghetti or something.

But I don't trust critics - At the moment I've managed to pose as being one of them - My shows don't have to be properly criticised because they're not really in that field - But there's gonna come a moment of "How's Campbell getting away with all this?"

[What does the future hold?] There's a party on Friday I'm looking forward to...

IAN SHUTTLEWORTH

Review of FUNGUS THE BOGEYMAN for FINANCIAL TIMES. May 1995 (unpublished)

It's not hard to see why theatrical fruitcake Ken Campbell has been attracted for so long to Raymond Briggs' gleefully vile children's book. A hero who luxuriates in slime and slop, and whose job is to creep up at night to the surface world and engender boils on unsuspecting Kevs and Sharons, is the sort of figure who is right up Campbell's alley - or, more accurately, right down his dank and malodorous burrow. Fifteen years on from his first failed attempt, Coventry's Belgrade Theatre has finally given him the chance to direct a stage version in all its noisome glory.

Mac MacDonald as Fungus revels in the grime and nastiness, relishing the opportunities to turn the stomachs of more unsuspecting audience members. (In fact, on the opening night he inadvertently gave rather more than his all, as the seat of his pants headed south and rewarded us with a brief "Dagenham smile".) Aided by Claire Lyth's wonderful, bilious design, MacDonald is Fungus come to life, rubbing bottoms as a sign of affection for his "drearest" wife Mildew (Martyn Jacques [of perv-cabaret group The Tiger Lillies] in shrieking falsetto and reeking crinoline) and moistening the dry bread of his rotten sandwich by dipping it in the toilet cistern.

Mike Carter takes Briggs' story a step further, steering bogey-son Mould (Tracy Harper) into bad company with a bunch of rebellious "drop-ins" who yearn to live cleanly above ground and clandestinely watch "video nicies" such as Reader's Digest gardening tapes; Fungus himself is imbued with an anti-social fascination with cleanliness in the form of a secret collection of loo-rolls. Naturally, the harmony of filthiness is ultimately restored, as the rehabilitated Fungus arms himself with pump- action slime-guns and, like a pustular Rambo, reclaims his son from the loathsome hygiene of the hospital up top. Harmony of a different kind is the show's major weakness. Carter and Corin Buckeridge have written a through-composed musical - a "plop opera". Unfortunately, it's fatally light on actual numbers. Lines are sung either in unrhymed recitative or in songs which largely sound like unrhymed recitative. Occasionally a standard but unmemorable chord sequence emerges for a minute or two, but then it's back to the musical murk of a poor '70s pop opera in the key of P minor.

Despite this crippling drawback, Campbell and cast keep the atmosphere of nasty fun festering along satisfactorily, with the likes of gratuitous elastic-willy gags and a bookshelf crammed with titles such as "a la Recherche de Bogeys Perdu". It's a custom-made Christmas show, so whether it will do the desired business at Whitsuntide remains to be seen, but I suppose that if it's your particular cake of snot it's enjoyable enough at any time of year.

IAN SHUTTLEWORTH

Theatre column for OK! magazine, 6/10/96 issue

[Note the camp'n'breathless writing style for a mainstream women's- magazine readership :-)]

You know the kind of nutter who sits down beside you on the bus and starts telling you that he can pick up Radio 5 Live with his dental fillings, or how he lost this year's crop of shallots to a neighbour's baboon; and you think he's probably off his trolley, but aren't quite sure, and anyway he isn't actually threatening and is really rather fun to listen to... That's Ken Campbell, that is.

Not literally, of course, but Ken - the possessor of one of those faces you instantly recognise but can't always put a name to - has amassed a great deal of weird experience over the course of his career. He's staged the longest play ever (the 22-hour-long "The Warp") and the opening production at the National's Cottesloe Theatre ("Illuminatus", which originally boasted stage designs by Bill Drummond, later of rock pranksters the KLF); John Alderton first met Pauline Collins at a rehearsal for one of his plays; Bob Hoskins, Sylvester McCoy, Jim Broadbent and a host of others passed through the ranks of his anarchic Roadshow in the Seventies; he's appeared in everything from "In Sickness And In Health" to Peter Greenaway's film "A Zed And Two Noughts"; and over the past eight years he's perfected the art of bizarre solo theatrical rambles.

In "Furtive Nudist" he told us about his "office" at a picnic table on Walthamstow Marshes; "Pigspurt!" included a breathtakingly oddball translation of a Ken Dodd routine into the Pidgin language of the South Seas; during "Jamais Vu" he amassed a collection of sink plungers on his bald pate; and "Mystery Bruises" covered everything from an interview with Professor Stephen Hawking to whether a minor character in "Macbeth" might be a dwarf. You get the picture: Ken Campbell is, shall we say, an unusual man.

The National Theatre has increasingly taken Ken under its wing over the last few years; in 1993, artistic director Richard Eyre invited him to perform his (then) three solo shows at the Cottesloe - Ken immediately decided that this was intended to complement the three David Hare plays the National had just put on, and so announced that the theatre was following up the Hare Trilogy with the Bald Trilogy.

His latest show, "Violin Time", is back at the Cottesloe for a brief run this month, and is unusual even by his standards in that it's a solo show featuring a cast of two; Ken is augmented by a talented young Vietnamese violinist. But, as he says about all those mystical quests, "What do you do once you've achieved oneness? Move on to twoness!"

IAN SHUTTLEWORTH

Review of VIOLIN TIME for FINANCIAL TIMES, October 1996

After his several previous one-man shows, Ken Campbell bestrides the world of solo theatrical weirdness like an improbably-sculpted colossus. "Violin Time" has been seen over the last year or so in various stages of development, but this - we must assume - is the definitive version. As such, naturally, it bears only a tenuous relation to the definitive version recently published by Methuen; were he to perform that text in its entirety, Campbell assures us, it "would take as long as 'War and Peace' and then a bit of the 'War' again."

At first on the press night he was a little uneasy and hesitant, perhaps believing the sentiment he jokingly attributed to Richard Eyre that this show would have "to be even better than [the critics] said your last one was." To an extent, also, "Violin Time" assumes that the "seekers" in the audience will be familiar at least in passing either with Campbell's style or the oddities he addresses – which in this case include est therapy, the conspiracy to force confederation of Newfoundland with Canada in 1948, the Cathar heresy and ferrets. He also touches on interplanetary reincarnation... never mind which planet he may have been on in a previous life, it is mind-boggling enough to speculate which planet he is on in this one.

Somehow, though, he manages to draw all these areas (and several others) into a narrative which, if not exactly coherent, is crazily compelling and enormous fun. He has a magnificent ear for phrases which sound inherently absurd, talking about writing "notes to some mice" and explaining the name of his musical accompanist, Thieu-Hoa Vuong (who doodles quietly away on her violin at certain times, interjecting musical "stings" at appropriate points in his ramble), as being "pronounced like the question to which the answer might be 'coffee': 'Tea or Wha'?'" And surely there can be no more infectiously funny sight than Ken Campbell's face creasing into a mask of incredulous hilarity when confronted with an unexpected and peculiar turn of events.

"Violin Time" is the funniest of his solo shows on the page. In performance, it is impossible to convey the infinite regression of footnotes, or - as he acknowledges - to take the time to recount his entire tale of semi-romantic attachment and spirit possession (imagine if "Foucault's Pendulum" had been written by Ken Dodd instead of Umberto Eco). It may not be the best point of entry into Campbell's oeuvre - which is probably 1994's "Mystery Bruises" or the compendium show "Theatre Stories" - but for anyone in search of the mental equivalent of a fairground House of Fun, Campbell's premises are the original and best.

IAN SHUTTLEWORTH

Mail Ian Shuttleworth about Ken: shutters@cix.co.uk.

Mail Dave Farmbrough about Ken: dfarmbrough@cix.co.uk.

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