The National Theatre’s tribute to Ken Campbell last night was a delicious ragbag of capers including one I’d never seen before: Toby Sedgwick playing a rasher of bacon as it sizzled in the pan, flipped over, then sizzled again.

Sedgwick curled up into a crispy foetal ball, somehow reducing the length of his body into that of a well fried rasher.

We also relished the sight of Nina Conti proceeding to the back of the Olivier stalls with a fifty foot length of knicker elastic that she was stretching from the mouth of her “husband” in order to pang him out of his dangerous invasion of his own posterior.

Hubby gripped the lethal device in  his teeth. Was he ready? Yes. Knicker elastic rebounded at top speed in the wrong direction…

Two extended extracts from Illuminatus! and The Warp gave a good idea of the epic bagginess of those two ridiculously ambitious play cycles, if not the full flavour and impromptu ingenuity of their original stagings.

But the whole show, devised by Ken’s daughter Daisy and directed by Richard Eyre, reminded us not only of what a great spirit Campbell was, but also what a great writer.

There were three long episodes from Pigspurt, the second of his “bald” trilogy (which played alongside the Hare trilogy at the National in 1993), performed by Toby Jones, Alan Cox and Chris Fairbank.

Each of these different actors confirmed that there might indeed be a real theatrical future for this marvellously embellished autobiographical material performed by people other than the master himself. The writing is simply too good to languish between book covers.

John Sessions compered with a languid brilliance, Daisy led a hilarious distillation of the Pidgin Macbeth, and Warren Mitchell touchingly took the stage, very frail now on his pins, to tell us that he was the one who doesn’t talk like Ken Campbell.

The last twenty minutes by the improv group the School of Night was a digest of great stuff that just began to outstay its welcome as the clock ticked past the last bus home mark and the odd seeker wilted in the stalls or began crept away to the outside world of dull normality.

In this respect, the event took on the atmosphere of a Ken Dodd show, testing the audience’s patience by the simple expedient of refusing to give in or shut up. This, of course, would have delighted the other Ken no end.

Richard Eyre announced that there would be an annual Ken Campbell awards show, which should prove marginally more enjoyable than the Oliviers, and the audience dispersed to find all the bars shut and the South Bank a forlorn no-go area.

But folk had themselves to be interested in and catch up with.

The audience included many Campbellians and assorted luminaries such as producers Kenith Trodd and Peter Stevens; Road Show originals Dave Hill, Jane Wood and Sylvester McCoy; Sue Birtwistle and David Beames of the 1975 Nottingham Playhouse Roundabout company that first performed Ken’s Skungpoomery; old friends like the actress Susan Tracy, Richard Adams (graphic designer of the Royal Dickens Company hoax) and the constant Jeff Merrifield.

And we learned something new: Ion Alexis Will, Campbell’s schoolfriend at Chigwell and collaborator on his 1974 play The Great Caper, was official dope dealer to the Grateful Dead.

Campbell, like Dickens, celebrated people for their wonderful oddity, such as the actor who embodied the legendary minus quality of making the stage seem fuller when he left it. As indeed does Ken Campbell now. He’s gone, but ever present.
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.