Review: KENREX, The Other Palace

Content Warning: violence, sexual violence

A nervous high school student gets up on stage to sing The Star-Spangled Banner at a community fair. Through the tinny microphone feedback, we begin to hear shuffling sounds at the foot of the stage, and sense a presence just out of sight. This is the adult man who will groom the young student, and marry her to avoid allegations of statutory rape.

This is the type of ominous small town tension, the lingering fear that something rotten lies beneath the wholesome community spirit, pervading Kenrex, which transfers to London after acclaimed runs at Sheffield Theatres and Southwark Playhouse.

The titular Kenneth Rex McElroy was a real-life “town bully” in the 400-person town of Skidmore, Missouri, whose crimes in the 1970s escalated from arson, to child molestation, to attempted murder. For years, he evaded justice with the help of Richard McFadin, a slippery lawyer with motives unclear, before meeting his end at the hands of the community he terrorised.

A chameleon-like Jack Holden, who co-wrote the show with Ed Stambollouian, portrays both McElroy and McFadin, as well as our narrator, the earnest prosecuting attorney David Baird, and many more side characters.

He’s most convincing, however, as Ken, his stance hunched, arms limp and voice guttural, saying things like “you ever hunt rats, city boy?” You can already feel a villain of American folklore starting to gain his infamy, and even the play’s mononymous title seems to suggest this, that Ken is more of a bogeyman than a living, breathing character.

This is less a musical than it is a play with music, with onstage musician John Patrick Elliott switching between three guitars, a banjo and a drumkit to provide a soundtrack that suggests both cosy Americana and industrial apocalypse. There’s clever use of sound design, too, with Holden often lip-syncing to pre-recorded tracks, creating a sense of distance between reality and what we’re seeing on stage.

After taking its time to really immerse us in our setting in the first act, Kenrex struggles to follow through in the second. As thinly drawn side characters articulate their desire for vengeance against Ken, even someone as adept at voice work as Holden can’t always create a clear distinction between them.

The show also can’t quite make up its mind when it comes to vigilante justice. The young lawyer Baird mounts a powerful defence of doing things by the book, but there’s also a last-ditch effort to garner audience sympathy for the abusive Ken, via the woman he molested, which feels rather rushed and ill-considered.

These feel like minor qualms, though, when this show is such a feast for both the eyes and the ears. With little more than a step ladder, an LED archway, several microphone stands, and a liberally employed smoke machine, designer Anisha Fields evokes everything from an empty saloon bar to a high-speed police chase. The effect is intimate even in such a vast space, as though Holden’s cast of characters are letting us in on the realities of their lives, at our own peril.

In some ways, Kenrex has more sense of the mood of the story it wants to tell than the story itself. Profound fable about the meaning of justice this is not, but it is a fine evocation of rural America’s darker sides, even if it can’t always articulate what those darker sides are.

Kenrex plays at The Other Palace until 1 February 2026

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