“‘I'm not mad”, said Ken, “I've just read different books’” (p. 204). Michael Coveney's biography of Ken Campbell (1941–2008) charts the itinerant career of an impresario bedevilled and inspired by some of the more mind-bending literary projects of his generation. An avid reader of the Fortean Times, Campbell's inborn curiosity for strange phenomena, bizarre synchronicities, portents and prodigies in the (super)natural worlds fed a lifetime's exploration of ‘the wild frontiers between the known and unknown’ (p. 69). From the urban myths which informed the sketches and songs of the Ken Campbell Road Show in the 1970s, to the visionary novels of Philip K. Dick and Theodore Roszack which inspired his 1990s trilogy of monologues, Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu, Campbell and his fellow ‘seekers’ plundered the canons of countercultural literature, transforming an ‘obsession with the cosmic beauty of the world’ into a rough-and-ready theatrics of ‘minimal means in informal circumstances with immediate impact’ (p. 70).
A chronologically ordered overview of a decidedly erratic life, Coveney begins at the beginning with Campbell's ancestry and ends at the end with a poem read by his granddaughter on the anniversary of his death. In the intervening dozen chapters, Coveney diligently recounts a series of milestones in his subject's career: training at RADA; the genesis at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, of the Ken Campbell Road Show; successes with children's theatre at Nottingham Playhouse; the ‘The Royal Dickens Company’ hoax; the birth of his daughter, Daisy; and his successes as a solo performer. The liveliest material is contained in chapters which focus upon two monumental works, Illuminatus! (1976) and The Warp (1979). The former and, at a mere eight hours, the shorter of these works was based on the 1975 cult sci-fi thriller The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. A ‘drug-filled quagmire of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy, synchronicity and sexploitation, world domination and rampant paranoia’ (p. 103), Campbell's Illuminatus! mingled 450 speaking parts on a stage ‘the size of a rabbit hutch’ (p. 97). Even the ambition of Illuminatus!, however, was later dwarfed by The Warp, a thousand-page script which clocked in at over eighteen hours of theatre.
At the launch of this book at the Royal Court, a panel discussion was held with some illustrious guests: Richard Eyre, Jim Broadbent, John Sessions and Nina Conti. Each one of these former collaborators – along with several members of the audience – delighted in impersonating Campbell's reedy, nasal, swaggeringly Essex tones. Strangely enough, this ‘voice’ – a mad, compelling personality – feels somehow missing from Coveney's book: sparks of selected excerpts from Campbell's letters leap out in sharp contrast to Coveney's rather dutiful prose. Written in celebration of a life, Coveney's biography tends towards hagiography: contradictions are glossed and an odd silence settles over the more contentious material. Where Coveney does succeed, however, is in demonstrating the need to revisit and reassess some of the most extraordinary contributions to the repertoire of postwar British theatre: those great capers of Ken Campbell.
