Review: KENREX, The Other Palace
Photo credit: Pamela Raith
KENREX, staged previously at Sheffield Theatres, is a performance-driven tale of small-town justice. Written and performed by Jack Holden, it has created a buzz in the theatre community for its unconventional journey through a murder trial, and deserves all the hype.
The play opens with a simple premise: a local Midwestern prosecutor is asked on record to recall an unusual murder case. We listen through interview tapes and simulated phone booths as a panicked young woman calls the police: her husband had been shot dead in his pickup truck. The audience is then invited into what will prove to be a much less simple story.
KENREX is performed entirely by Holden, playing every role, and John Patrick Elliott, the on-stage musician. It’s not quite a musical, but the music is essential, guiding the audience through a tale that, without it, could be very tonally dissonant. It thrums and thumps and twangs a malleable country beat through the majority of the narrative as an atmospheric accompaniment. The world-building is layered with hokey comic beats that hit perfectly, lulling the audience into a false sense of security as the simmering threat takes hold. And when it does, and the music cuts out, there is an audible audience reaction.
Joshua Pharo’s exceptional lighting and video design lifts the dramatics of a one-man show into something truly immersive, drawing focus to empty spaces, to microphones without speakers, to a single doorway leading to justice or to disaster. Giles Thomas’ sound design warps Holden’s single voice into a mob made up inexplicably of individuals, guiding the audience to each character and timeline through the crackling of radios, the tinniness of an interview tape, and the heart-stopping echoes of gunfire in the otherwise peaceful space of an ordinary town. Anisha Fields’s set needs little addition - barely changing throughout - it’s only a matter of performer interaction. Fields’ design facilitates cold courtrooms and tight, tense moments in intimate bars, and all Holden needs to do to switch between is swivel a doorway.
Jack Holden himself is a powerhouse. It is easy to forget the show is a single performer, as he loses himself entirely into each character, physically and vocally transforming enough to have audiences on the edge of their seat while also acknowledging the drawbacks of a one-man show to comic - and dramatic - effect. Though it’s theatre in its purest form, it mostly avoids feeling overdone or pretentious. Holden conjures righteous fury from the town towards the play’s bully, and then, with little warning, sympathy for the villain’s ally. What begins as comic pantomime ends with poignancy.
KENREX is pure theatre: fully engrossing entertainment, intrigue, and humour. It is a thrumming bassline accompanying an absorbing tale, a juicy mystery in “True Crime” style, with a satisfying conclusion you may or may not see coming. It is earnest without insistence and its moral complexities, one unravelled, leave you feeling like you’ve learnt something.
A crackling and compelling mic-drop of a show.
***** Five stars
Reviewed by: Oli Burgin
KENREX plays at The Other Palace in London until 1 February, with further info here.
