Ken Campbell obituary: one of the strangest people in Britain

Salvaged from the old ATU site:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tkRa3ZdgMe0J:acrosstheuniverse.forumotion.com/t3946-ken-campbell-obituary-one-of-the-strangest-people-in-britain+site:acrosstheuniverse.forumotion.com+acrosstheuniverse+%2B+the+third+man&cd=26&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google.co.uk

I must have missed this thread last time around. I loved Ken

^
Thread replicated below in the event of link expiry.

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Experimental writer, theatre director and improviser, he was one of the strangest people in Britain


Michael Coveney

guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 September 2008 13.15 BST



Unclassifiable ... Ken Campbell. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

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 monologist, a genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing 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 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. 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 barroom tales of sexual and psychic mayhem while banging nails up their noses and stuffing ferrets down their trousers.

Even more remarkable than Illuminatus! was his 10-play (22-hour) hippy extravaganza, The Warp (1979), a sort of acid Archers co-written with the poet Neil Oram. The protagonist's search for his own female consciousness took him from 15th-century Bavaria to a flying-saucer conference in 1968. Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent were among the cast of unknowns; characters included 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 - subsequently revived as a rave-music 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 hugely 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 film 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 famously hedonistic, twinkling 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 takeover 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 in one episode of Fawlty Towers. He was 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 show business.

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."

He had pursued improvisation as a goal in itself in recent years, and had just returned from the Edinburgh 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.

Ken 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, who also 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 him 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, he 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 subsequently 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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_c4mw-qThk
Ken Campbell DIY Seance- Part One.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFAIg0WfLIg&feature=related
Ken Campbell- DIY Seance Part Two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGrB8js5MD8&feature=related
Ken Campbell- DIY Seance Part Three.

Ken Campbell (1941-2008): A unique theatrical talent


By Paul Bond
11 September 2008


The death of the restlessly brilliant Ken Campbell, aged just 66, has robbed the theatre of one of its most inspiring talents. He was instantly recognisable: a short, bald man with increasingly unruly eyebrows, possessed of an extraordinary speaking voice, once compared to an exhaust pipe with a broken silencer. He did take some commercial television work in sitcoms and soap operas, and some small film parts, but his reputation was established on the basis of the singularity of his own theatrical vision.

A writer, director and actor, with a groundbreaking series of epic productions in the early 1970s, and latterly a highly acclaimed sequence of semi-autobiographical monologues, Campbell forged a highly intelligent and energetic theatrical style. He continued to push at the technical boundaries of the theatre, staging Shakespearean productions in Vanuatu pidgin and championing ventriloquism. He had a rambunctious and vibrant theatrical vision that was not in the least bit precious. People tended to call him “genius” or “maverick,” he noted, in order not to employ him.

Campbell was born in 1941 in Ilford, Essex, on the eastern outskirts of London. Keen on school plays, he was also participating in the local Renegades Theatre Company. James Cooper, who ran Renegades, was an early hero for Campbell. The son of a local brush salesman, Cooper played the leading roles, painted the sets, worked the box office, and talked a lot about Noel Coward.

Campbell told one interviewer that he decided to become an actor while hitchhiking across Germany at the age of 15, largely as something to talk about with drivers who offered him a lift. As their efforts to dissuade him became more vociferous, he also added writer, director, and theatre-manager to the plan.

Campbell was, by his own admission, an unreliable narrator with regard to facts. He told the same interviewer that Bald Trilogy was “basically autobiographical, but I had no worries about putting things in the wrong order. It’s irrelevant whether it’s true or not. It’s just whether it adds up in the story sense.”

His time at Renegades left him fascinated by every aspect of a theatrical production.

He went from school to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), one of the foremost acting schools in Britain. He struggled with the voice classes, which were aimed at producing actors for the classical stage. “Once you’d developed this [RADA-type] voice,” he said, “You were encouraged to use it at all times—on the bus, in the pub and so on.” The school by no means discouraged him. The principal told him that he was clearly a comic actor, and therefore did not need to use that voice. Instead, he was encouraged to think of his own, well-developed voice as part of a repertoire of funny voices.

Two things emerge from this. One is his mistrust of the received and standardised in the theatre. In Richard Eyre’s words, Campbell was “a lifelong opponent of ‘brochure’ theatre...theatre that gets done because something has to be programmed and announced in the brochure.”

The other is his dedication to his craft as he understood it. Drama schools are not shy about expelling students who do not make the grade. His talents were already recognised as different from those of other students, but of a high and distinctive quality.

After RADA, he joined the Colchester Repertory Theatre. In later years, he would urge a return of the weekly repertory system, whereby companies produced a new show every week. This was slightly romantic, but he learned a great deal about the craft—and prevailing culture—of theatre in weekly rep. In the monologue Pigspurt, he recounts a story of becoming a Third-Act Detective, and disrupting the company’s routine by, first, learning his lines, and second, by getting big laughs. Such was the anger among the older professionals that he reduced himself to appearing to forget his first line so the audience would not laugh. Such events taught him a great deal about the theatre as he found it, and he used them to create a theatre of his own.

He was still, briefly, following the same course as any other young actor. He worked as a stooge for the comic Dick Emery, who poured a pot of coffee into his lap one night for getting an unsolicited laugh. He spent nine months in a touring production of Lionel Bart’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, and understudied Warren Mitchell (a friend with whom he would work several times) in the flop Everybody Loves Opal.

He was beginning to move in his own idiosyncratic directions. He spent two years directing the Bournemouth Aqua Show—at any rate, “the shallow end acting bits.” He had begun to write sketches. His first full-length play, Events of an Average Bath Night, was directed by Mitchell at RADA, but attracted little notice.

The thriving regional theatre scene of that period was really the making of him. Peter Cheeseman of the Stoke Victoria was an early supporter, inviting him to act, write, and direct there. His children’s show Old King Cole was a notable success. He was becoming widely regarded, with director Lindsay Anderson keen to champion his work. Anderson had told Campbell about the work of Bertolt Brecht. Campbell said, “I didn’t get it, but his explanation was very inspiring,” so he wrote a play about the eighteenth century thief and prison-escapee Jack Sheppard. The play transferred to the Mermaid Theatre in London, where Campbell asked Anderson if that was what he had meant. No, said Anderson, but he invited Campbell to join the Royal Court as a junior director anyway.

The experience was not happy. Campbell clashed with his leading man, and Anderson took over the direction. Campbell felt humiliated and concluded that he was not cut out for the standard theatre. Later, he acknowledged that, although he could direct a bit, he only really enjoyed “directing something nobody else will. I don’t want to join the who-can-do-The-Cherry-Orchard-best competition, because the answer is it wouldn’t be me.” Feeling the need “to bounce back or give up,” he threw himself into his next project.

Back at a regional repertory theatre, he really hit his stride. The Bolton Octagon had money for an outreach project. Campbell was hired to run it. He assembled a brilliant young cast, including Bob Hoskins and Sylvester McCoy, and toured venues around Bolton performing urban legends, shaggy dog stories, and sideshow feats. McCoy earned the nickname “The Human Bomb” for such stunts as putting a ferret down his trousers. Campbell, McCoy, and David Rappaport reprised some of the stunts for the Amnesty International show The Secret Policeman’s Ball. Clips such as this one and its related series give a good flavour of the style, and of Campbell’s role as the presiding instigator.

A clash between Campbell and the Octagon was inevitable. Neither party felt that Campbell’s work reflected the productions in the main house. The Octagon let Campbell go (calling his work “an outrage”), but he now had a company and some experience at putting shows on cheaply in small venues. He and the company carried on as the Ken Campbell Road Show. At Anderson’s invitation, they returned to the Royal Court.

Campbell was enthusiastic about the improvisational work of companies like Keith Johnstone’s Theatre Machine and the American Living Theatre, and was looking more and more at producing theatrical events. He became increasingly critical of directors’ theatre, which he was to describe as “the slowest way of getting a show on.” He was much more interested in collaborative energy, although this might mean fierce directorial efforts and abuse to encourage greater input from his cast.

Richard Eyre, always an admirer, took him to Nottingham Playhouse to produce Bendigo: The Little Known Facts (about a prizefighter) and Walking Like Geoffrey (based on a local legend of people pretending to be lunatics to avoid paying taxes). Eyre described the shows as “unclassifiable, part musicals, part comic extravaganzas, part circus.”

He also made the most intelligent use of Campbell as an actor on the classical stage, casting him in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and The Alchemist. The verbal wit, theatricality, and physical knockabout of Jonson suited Campbell perfectly, and indicated his forebears. He was never less than professional and serious in his commercial work, but his description of television as “tie acting” (where you have to mumble into your tie) indicates where his real interest as a performer lay.

His own productions were getting bigger. He established the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, in part so he could socialise with science fiction writers, whom he found “much more fun than playwrights.” With Chris Langham he co-wrote a five-play, eight-hour version of Illuminatus! which was used as the opening production of the National Theatre’s Cottesloe Theatre. Campbell was critical of the Royal National Theatre (as it now is) for not mentioning the production in any of its promotional brochures about the theatre.

There was even bigger to come. The Warp, which consisted of 10 plays over 22 hours, was the story of Beat poet Neil Oram. It showed Campbell’s increasing fascination with the paranormal, mixed into a startling theatrical event. The Warp, which he claimed to have funded by lying to the Arts Council, went hand-in-hand with pranks against the British theatre establishment. In 1980, a letter, apparently from Trevor Nunn, claimed that after their successful adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, the Royal Shakespeare Company was dropping Shakespeare for Dickens. The letter invited participants to join the newly formed Royal Dickens Company. Nunn’s embarrassment was heightened by the number of responses he had from people refusing or, worse, accepting “his” offer. Campbell admitted the hoax after two weeks of chaos.

He accepted more television work in the 1980s, making regular appearances in Brookside and rejoining Warren Mitchell for In Sickness and in Health. Although always a welcome sight, this was a diversion from his real interests. He was nearly cast as Dr. Who in 1987, but lost out to Sylvester McCoy: insiders said his reading of the part was “too dark.”

Campbell remained fascinated by science, both official and fringe. He once told the critic Michael Billington, “I don’t believe in the pararnormal, but I allow or enjoy it.” Aside from the paranormal themes that run through the Bald Trilogy, he also hosted several popular science programmes on television, including Brainspotting and Six Experiments That Changed the World.

He worked these elements into the semi-autobiographical Bald Trilogy, so called because the (David) Hare Trilogy was playing in the next theatre at the National Theatre. Wide-rangingly entertaining (his show I’m Not Mad, I’ve Just Read Different Books was aptly titled), the plays introduced his latest theatrical obsessions (ventriloquism, pidgin) and tied them into a narrative of coincidences and conspiracies. The shows may have looked like random streams of consciousness, but they were built “like a piece of music.”

Ken Campbell was a great enthusiast. Sometimes the enthusiasms were silly (his argument that Jackie Chan was the greatest living actor is a good example), but they were worked into his theatre with skill, energy, and a frenzied intelligence. This reflects the man. Friends equally delighted in, and dreaded, his late night telephone calls. Simon McBurney recalls Campbell waking him to talk about a musical sequel to the Ballad of Eskimo Nell, and vegetarian sausages.

For Campbell, theatre was a vibrant, engaging, hectoring, art form that should strive for heights of imagination and entertainment. When he staged a one-man show based on his application to run the National Theatre, he made a case for it to host the remaining great comics. (He was a great admirer of Ken Dodd.) The show, If I Ruled The National Theatre, was a sustained attack on what he called “the law of little imagination.” His theatrical ideas, like the Enantiodromia expounded in Pigspurt (that each half of the asymmetrical face has its own character), have opened new possibilities for actors.

In recent years, he had been enthusiastically encouraging improvisation events. The 2005 Improvathon attempted a 36-hour performance without a script. When he died he had just returned from the Edinburgh Festival where he was involved in another improvisational piece, turning fictional newspaper reviews into musicals.

Improvisation, the least predictable form of theatrical game-playing, is also one of the most imaginative. Ken Campbell’s best work was almost manically joyous and optimistic. (He had been teaching his parrot Doris to mimic his voice, so that it would live on after him.) He fought constantly to unleash the imagination, to learn more about people and science and to express this in a full-blooded, inventive, theatre. This unwavering commitment to his theatrical vision deserves recognition and praise.

Just in case you missed the link in the long text above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6NEldyPeXs
Ken Cambell & Sylvester McCoy- The Secret Policeman's Ball.

“I don’t believe in the paranormal, but I allow or enjoy it.”

It's mildly disappointing to learn this; I had Campbell pegged as some kind of eccentric shaman with access to secret knowledge.

John McLaughlin wrote:

"One of the strangest people in Britain" - now, that's an accolade to be proud of in the land of eccentricity.

Pity this is a bit out of sync. But, don't you just love Ken's voice?

^ Sowei, I don't believe you're really into the Ken Campbell thing, are you