Review: MY LIFE WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS, Circle and Star Theatre

The Boomer audience that David Benson expects for his one man show will need few reminders of the singular genius of Kenneth Williams. The mass media landscape of the 50, 60s, 70s and 80s comprised three television channels, BBC radio and a lot of cinemas, most with one screen. It’s fair to say that Kenny was never more than a day or two from appearing somewhere in that mix, as ubiquitous as anyone, before or since.

He was unforgettable too - the nasal vowels from those flaring nostrils, like a Grand National horse in the winner’s paddock suddenly daring us to laugh. There was also the erudition, coming not from the Oxbridge Footlights crowd with their public school vowels, but a working class, ex-serviceman autodidact who never hid his light under a bushel - though he hid plenty else in his closet.

Benson’s first contact with Williams, whose 100th ‘birthday’ falls in February, was via an unusual route. As a Birmingham comprehensive schoolboy in his early teens, his story was selected to be read by Kenneth on the BBC’s Jackanory - tens of thousands weren't. Benson was at first elated, but then, as he relates in the first half of the show, mortified, as Kenny was as camp as any man in the country (possibly betting without Larry Grayson and Mr Humphries). That would only exacerbate his bullying in the jungle of a 1970s school playground, particularly for a lad coming to terms with his own sexuality and recoiling from its comic exaggeration, once so popular on television.

That said, to have Kenny, with Bernard Cribbins and Rik Mayall surely the holy trinity of Jackanory presenters, read his own words was a thrill and is now preserved on a personally recorded cassette tape, the BBC wiping the originals as they so thoughtlessly and so often did back then.  

Having established his connection (since made concrete with many performances over three decades as Williams) Benson becomes Kenny after the interval in three monologues that show what made him such an unforgettable presence.

Benson conjures Kenny’s authenticity, the edge of rage that was never far from the surface, whether manifesting his love-hate relationship with his mother, showing off wildly as an audience Q&A or, sensationally, delivering a tour-de-force in a nightmarish restaurant scene. It’s here that we feel the power of his charisma, his highwire act in holding back his depression while performing (always performing) and so so sadly, for anyone who has read the diaries, the spiral down  and down to the shared last line. Benson does his hero proud and we get the thrill of proximity to a man now dead just shy of 38 years ago, gone younger than I am now.

The show feels a little long and imbalanced - the first half could lose 15 minutes easily (or throw in a few more Eric Morecambes and Frankie Howerds - the mimicry is a marvel) - but it is in its evocation of a unique, discomforted and discomfiting man who was also a compelling, relentless entertainer, that the show scores. 

There was nobody quite like him, but nobody will get closer than Benson - and that is a delight.  

My Life With Kenneth Williams is on tour