Seeking out the double meaning of life

IS KEN Campbell mad or what? Is he really as nutty as the fruitcake we

are eating in a douce cafe above an Edinburgh bookshop? Is Ken odd?

Beyond our Ken, so to speak? This is, after all, the man who maintains

that on coming across the Jungian definition of Enantiodromia, the

sudden transformation into an opposite form or tendency -- Jekyll and

Hyde -- he found his face had two distinct personalities, that of a

spanking squire and a gentle, depressed housewife.

He was reading the science-fiction works of Philip K. Dick for an

Institute of Contemporary Arts celebration of the tenth anniversary of

the writer's death, called Desert Island Dicks, when he came across this

schizophrenic theory which fits exactly with his own notions about

acting, which he now calls Phrenological Pphorming, or two-faced acting.

Campbell now stages all his work on this basis: in his one-man show,

Pigspurt!, he thinks he has solved the two-faced meaning of life. The

latest production he has supervised as a director in this vein is

currently on the Edinburgh festival fringe. It is called Slatzer's

Bouquet and is an investigation into Marilyn Monroe's death.

Not so much a play, it is more a photo-call for a play, according to

Campbell. ''Ha haaaa,'' he roars. ''It is an oddity piece, an outside

genre,'' he guffaws over his coffee. ''It's a bit like that crap Godard

used to do. I thought those films were really trite, but that's it, you

become what you laugh at, ha haaaa haaaaa.'' The play has been devised

by Campbell's friend Jeff Merrifield. They met more than 20 years ago,

the clown prince of British theatre and Merrifield, a mature student at

Chorley College of Further Education, when Campbell was touring with his

Road Show.

The latter grew out of community tours and began at the Stoke-on-Trent

Victoria and moved on to the Bolton Octagon, where they threw him out

for being bawdy. (Campbell's reaction was to suggest flooding the

auditorium and filling it with dwarfs. They didn't.) The Road Show moved

on to Chorley, where Merrifield was ''head of revels and had access to

printing and he sorted out the posters and all that stuff and contacted

other concert secretaries.

''He used to lay on what seemed extraordinary trips at the time, going

into prisons and performing in chapels. The Road Show used to create

riots; I don't mean they were up on the roof, but a lot of our

sketches were about confrontation with the police, like the man bursting

for a **** in the high street, who dropped his trousers, did it, then a

policeman came round the corner and he quickly covered it with his

bowler hat. The policeman asked, 'what have you got there?' and the man

replied, 'I've caught a rare butterfly, officer'. Well, this sketch used

to last about two minutes but in prison it lasted for about 45 minutes.

There was cheering at every moment.

''At one time we performed this stuff under the title of God's

Trombone, ha haaaa. So Jeff's always been in my life. I hadn't seen him

for a few years when there was a knock on the door and he said, 'hello,

I guess you've been very lazy about punk'. I said, 'yeah, I haven't

bothered with it'. So every Sunday he took me to concerts and we weren't

young, he must have been about 40, but we used to go and jump up and

down and spit and everything and we really got into it. So that's

Jeff.''

What Campbell omits to say in his nasal Ilford twang is that it was

during the famous raucous Road Show days with Merrifield that he devised

such wheezes as having the actors Bob Hoskins and Sylvester McCoy

banging nails up their noses, putting ferrets down their trousers and

generally gooning around riotously in a series of tall but true bar-room

tales, based on folk myths. The Road Show was once the subject of a

frank and fearless Sunday People investigation. ''Is it art?'' they

asked of Campbell's vulgar, popular approach. But was it journalism,

wondered one critic.

So is Slatzer's Bouquet theatre? Campbell says he doesn't know. His

Denis Healeyesque eyebrows bristling, his frog eyes popping, he says the

play sprang from Merrifield's discovery three years ago of the

ghostwritten memoirs of the detective Milo Spiriglio about the 13 years

he had spent investigating Monroe's death for her lover, Slatzer. While

the audience snap away with throwaway cameras at Monroe's spitting

image, Pauline Bailey, Merrifield and several ''rude mechanicals'' pick

their way through the various obscene and libellous conspiracy theories

about the actress's ''suicide''.

''I decided to have Pauline nattering away about her life as a Marilyn

lookalike because that's really what Norma Jean did, she invented

Marilyn Monroe as this cuddly kitten film star and spent her life

impersonating her. Nah, nah,'' denies Campbell, ''I'm not obsessed with

Monroe, plenty of people are, though. I just like the idea of having

Pauline there pretending to be Marilyn in all the costume changes. She

does the sitting-in-a-barn-in-yer-fishnets pose and the

having-a-breeze-up-your-frock one and she's rather wonderful and

enchanting when she talks about Marilyn in her 'sarf' London accent.''

MONROE has appeared in Campbell's work before. ''We once did a show

called Outbreak of God in Area Nine and I had an actor who was being Ian

McKellen as Macbeth when he was suddenly entered by the wandering spirit

of Marilyn Monroe, ha haaa, and started singing 'Happy Birthday, Mr

President', ha haaa. In the same show we did a sketch about Barry Norman

being taken over by the lost soul of Elvis Presley, ha haaa . . . ''

And suddenly we are off down another loony Campbell by-way, as he

stands up in his daft black velvet hat and sensible anorak, this

sanctified nutter and antic performer on the lunatic fringe, to

demonstrate the routine, much to the mystification of our fellow diners.

That's what it's like talking to the actor who is Alf Garnett's

neighbour Fred Johnson in In Sickness and In Health and who pops up in

films and on television as various bent lawyers and assorted lunatics,

the man who is founder of the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, and

the author of Recollections of a Furtive Nudist (seen at the Traverse in

1989), in which Campbell saw himself messing about in Barkingside after

the Second World War, witnessing the trepanning of Anna May Wong in

Stoke-on-Trent, and blasting off from a hectic chase across Paddington

Station into the Infinitude of Absolute Mind.

''Quick, quick,'' he says, ''switch on your tape-recorder, I have

something important to say.'' I had had to switch the machine off

because I was in danger of ending up with a tape of myself laughing like

a drain.

''You saw Furtive Nudist didn't you? Well, do you remember me talking

about the alleged 1972 teleportation of Andy Jones, a tubby Newfoundland

comic? By reading 'magikal' texts in my toilet in NW3, my fear was that

I had teleported Jones out of a public convenience in the King's Cross

area to where, to what, I didn't know.'' At the end of the show punters

would come up to him in the Traverse bar and ask, ''But what did happen

to Andy Jones?'' He didn't know, until after the penultimate peformance

when a woman announced, ''I know Andy Jones.'' She told Campbell that he

had teleported Jones back to St Johns, the capital of Newfoundland,

where he had become a quite famous comedian.

Some months later, Jones invited Campbell to perform Nudist in the

Longshoremen's Protective Union Hall, so that he could hear what was

being said about him. In Newfoundland, Campbell discovered towns with

rude names like Dildo, Up Your Chimney and Shove-Me-Tickles. He met a

vicar's daughter who picked magic mushrooms, a man who had spent the

morning putting all he owned into boxes, and Andy Jones's brother Mike

who ''was a monk into his mid-20s and who didn't masturbate until he was

26 and who makes movies''.

And thus it was that 50-year-old Campbell ended up starring in Mike's

film, Secret Nation, which was premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival

last week, and which also features Andy Jones and his sister Cathy. ''It

is The Tale of How the British Betrayed the Newfoundland Nation, Rigged

Their Plebiscite and Sold Them to the Canadians,'' announces the wild

man of the fringe.

Newfoundland is truly Campbell's new-found land. He sent his daughter

Daisy, by the actress Prunella Gee, there for the Easter holidays and he

says he loves it so much he is thinking of ''disappearing'' there

himself. Because 50-year-old Campbell now lives alone, anyway, with only

his mongrel Fred for company, he says he has no ties in Britain and

Daisy could visit him regularly. (He has been dipping Fred, ''who has a

medical problem with his bollocks, having sat in something nasty,'' in

St Margaret's Loch in Holyrood park daily because he heard it has

curative properties.)

HE MUSES: ''I think I might have myself announced missing, presumed

dead in Newfoundland. There are no roads to the place so I could just go

there and vanish. I think Richard Eyre [the director of the Royal

National Theatre] is waiting until I'm dead anyway to put all my plays

on; he keeps writing glowing introductions to them but he never does

them, he just keeps saying how good they are in nice articles in the

Independent. He never rings up and offers me a job. They kind of ignore

you and call you an antic visionary.

''But if they thought I was dead, they'd do the plays and I'd come

back to find I had all this money saved up, ha haaa.'' A Campbell

retrospective. Now there's a thought to conjure with. The Edinburgh

Festival director, Brian McMaster, with his penchant for retro-theatre,

might like to give the idea some consideration.

The season could begin with Campbell's first play, which he wrote

after leaving RADA, Events of an Average Bathnight (which starred Warren

Mitchell). This could be followed by the speculative epic, The Great

Caper, about the search for the Perfect Woman, then a couple of the

Jonson-

ian immorality tales he wrote for Nottingham Playhouse, culminating in

the five-play Illuminatus, which opened the National Theatre's Cottesloe

space, and the 10-play, 22-hour cycle The Warp, in which Campbell had

the beat poet Neil Oram reinventing his quest for self-discovery,

through the 1968 Paris riots, a flying saucer conference, sexual trauma

and scientology. ''It was like the Archers on acid,'' wrote one critic,

while another was moved to describe Campbell as ''a latter-day fiddler

on the woof''.

Come on, Mr McMaster, think about it. Whaur's your Harley Granville

Barker and your C. P. Taylor noo?

*Slatzer's Bouquet is at Hill Street Theatre, Edinburgh, until

September 5.