Sometimes people come up to me after a show to tell me that
they can see the influence of Ken Campbell in my performance, even in an
interrogative nasal twang that inflects my voice.
I used to mention Ken in the press blurb to my last show,
‘The Human Loire’. It was a somewhat crass attempt to give myself some professional
back-story, to ride some famous coat-tails, given that no one has heard of me. (I
should never have supposed that being ‘known’ was a meaningful attribute in its
own right.) One listings website mis-read the blurb and stated that the show
was ‘directed by Ken Campbell’. I didn’t write in to correct them.
When thinking up stuff and how to perform it, I always keep
Ken in mind. He is the most discerning critic of what’s boring, half-hearted,
lazy and self-indulgent. His role is a symbolic one; like Socrates’ daimonion, he tells me what to avoid
rather than what to do. What would his opinion really be of my performances? I shudder to think.
Ken was known to get furious if you wasted his time on
anything that wasn’t astonishing and fascinating. I was (fortunately?) not on the receiving
end of his ire very often. At first I thought that he was being indulgent
towards me purely out of mischief towards the experienced trained actors he
would put me on stage with. ‘Look at Michael,’ he would hiss at the RADA graduates, ‘He’s brilliant,
and he edits gardening books!’
Later I would learn that Ken simply respected no hierarchy
on stage or off. (My dad was the same.) For Ken, every human being, no matter
what their professional back-story, contained the latent potential to amaze and
astonish other people and themselves. There were no rules as to what form this
potential should take; it was different for everyone Ken came in contact with. It
might even be the ‘legendary minus factor’: the ability to leave the stage and
make it look somehow fuller. Whatever Ken thought you had, he would seize on
and whip it into shape. I don’t think Ken ever really knew what to make of me,
but his interest in me was never to mould me into an acolyte, but to goad me
into discovering my potential and developing my self-astonishment. Only after his death
did I appreciate how many hundreds of lives Ken had changed in this way.
For me and for many others, Ken was a lighthouse, showing up the dangerous
rocks of banality on which so many boats have foundered and revealing the vast
extent of the expanses of exciting waters that lie beyond everything we're comfortable and familiar with.
When I half-consciously imitate Ken with my nasal mannerisms
on stage, it is a sign that I am being fearful, not confident enough to be
adventurous with my own voice. I am sailing too close to my lighthouse. And in
playing safe, I’m courting failure. He’d want me to strike out further, and
that is what I will endeavour to do in the future. I’m glad to say I've taken his name off my
press blurbs, but I will always keep Ken in view, if only as a speck of light
on the horizon to assure myself that I’m not sailing headlong up my own
arsehole. Only then will I perhaps one day generate a little light of my own.
