Ken Campbell - Later Career and One-man Shows

Later Career and One-man Shows

From the late eighties onwards Campbell wrote and performed a series of one-man shows, each a mélange of autobiographical stand-up comedy, ontological speculation and popular-science rant. They include Recollections of a Furtive Nudist, Jamais Vu, Mystery Bruises and Pigspurt. Several were published by Methuen. He toured them worldwide. Three of them were performed together at the National Theatre in 1993, as The Bald Trilogy: Furtive Nudist, Jamais Vu and Pigspurt.

Campbell was later commissioned by the National's director Trevor Nunn to write The History of Comedy Part One: Ventriloquism. The two had previously fallen out when Nunn had been director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1981. Campbell had carefully concocted a press release and a string of personal letters complete with forged signature: Nunn appeared to be announcing that henceforth, as a consequence of the huge success of its recent adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, the Royal Shakespeare Company would be changing its name to the Royal Dickens Company. Several grandees of the English theatre had been taken in by the hoax. Only when an exasperated Nunn called in Scotland Yard did Campbell finally own up.

In 1999, Campbell starred with Warren Mitchell and John Fortune in Art in London's West End.

In 2001 Campbell staged a version of Macbeth in pidgin English. It was the big gun in his campaign to get Bislama, first language of 6,000 inhabitants of the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu, formally adopted as a world language (wol wantok). The virtue of Bislama was that with a bit of determination you could pick it up in an afternoon. Campbell argued that, in certain respects, Macbeth in pidgin was better than the original. If nothing else, the campaign had the effect of bringing to a wider public the Bislama for Prince Philip: "Nambawan bigfala emi blong Misis Kwin" (Number one big fellow him belong Mrs Queen).

With Alan Moore, Bill Drummond, Mixmaster Morris and Coldcut, he appeared at the Royal Festival Hall in 2007 in a memorial tribute to Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the Illuminatus! novels.

In July 2008 Staffordshire University awarded Campbell an honorary doctorate, labelling him one of Staffordshire's "greatest living success stories", a reference to his time as artist in residence in 1967 at Stoke-on-Trent's Victoria Theatre.

Campbell appeared on 6 September 2009, over a year after his death, in the first of a new series of Marple on ITV. He played Crump; his wife was played by the late Wendy Richard.