Review: MY LIFE WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS, Circle & Star Theatre
To Hampstead Besties, and the Circle and Star Theatre above the Horseshoe Pub, a comfortable fringe venue well suited to the latest incarnation of David Benson’s homage to Kenneth Williams. Bit of a cold wait outside however; the promised doors opening 30 minutes before turned out to be only 15 minutes.
Benson is a skilled exponent of one person shows like this, as well as being uncannily expert at embodying Williams and a great many other people. The show begins with Williams reciting the Walrus and the Carpenter but after that reminder, we are taken into the developing relationship between actor and subject, rather than just the portrayal of a character.
My Life with Kenneth Williams is as much about Benson as it is about Williams, and all the more fascinating as a result. Surely no-one in this Hampstead audience would have expected to find themselves singing hymns and playing the role of a 1975 school assembly in Birmingham. The first half of the show focuses on the 13 year old Benson, winner of a competition to have his story read on Jackanory, and we see him listen in horror as it is Kenneth Williams and not his idol Spike Milligan who reads the story.
Benson has revisited and developed the play in what is the centenary year of Williams’ birth, and dramatises that tenuous early connection between Benson and his subject, who he never met. These engaging recreations make full use of the audience to play various roles, which was met with eager participation from the Hampstead audience. Benson’s recreation of the teacher taking assembly is totally convincing and very different from the other characters he portrays. The whole setting was very familiar to those of us who remember 1975, and a show of hands showed that most of the audience did.
The opening sections were a little faltering, but since these were in the interactive part of the play, they were easily glossed over. After the interval, the focus shifts from Benson to Williams, who we see in the less public and more angst-ridden setting of his personal life. The change in tone is well managed, with an interlude at a poetry recital followed by a lengthy recreation of a dinner party with friends, where Williams domineers and bullies his guests and insults members of the public. Benson manages to make us see not just Williams in full flow but also his unspeaking dinner companions. We watch in dismay as this greatly talented and much loved personality becomes a victim of his own self-loathing and unhappiness, finally seen shovelling in the pills in agony.
It’s an engrossing but deeply sad portrayal of a great but flawed figure, presented by an actor who truly inhabits his subject, both physically and through his unerring recreation of Williams’ vocal characteristics. We remember Williams with delight for his entertaining public persona but we see in this piece the troubled man behind the façade.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Chris Abbott