The Spirit of the Stairwell

It’s that time of the year again where people from around the world all try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo to its friends, is a pretty insane undertaking where thousands of people all turn author simultaneously and, using the ‘Kill or Cure’ method of novel writing, throw themselves off the stony cliffs of procrastination to plunge unprotected into the boiling flotsam of literary endeavour.

And if you thought that sentence was hard work – wait ’til you see my novel.

Yes, I’m participating this year for the first time along with the Urban Cowboy, Shoelace and Red. I can’t speak for the others but my intention is to finally kick start a writing career littered with first chapters, opening acts and dead blogs. I dig the concept of writing at a break neck pace where necessity dictates research, editing and planning take a back seat to instinct and invention.

Historically, I’ve never finished writing a  book because I’m constantly rewriting its first chapter, so this is like shock therapy for me. I’ll produce something even if it’s awful.

Even if it kills me.

You can play along at home by following the wordcount on this blog and by tuning into the posts I’m intending to write every day. Because on top of the 50,000 words I’m going to start doing this blog in earnest – even if it’s a paragraph long, even if it’s just a bit of the novel I’m particularly proud of.

And I’m still training to go to Copenhagen.

And learning the Ukulele.

And starting to Improvise in front of a paying audience.

It feels like a good time for a revolution.

I was meant to go to an Arthur Russell retrospective at the ICA this evening but dropped everything and bought a ticket to the Olivier when I found out the National Theatre was hosting a celebration of the life of Ken Campbell as part of its Platforms series.

Now I didn’t know Ken personally nor had I ever seen any of his prodigious body of work (before tonight at any rate). I am, however, a member of the London impro community and you can’t hang around with that crowd for very long without realising how important Mr Campbell is. In fact, he seems to be stamped indelibly onto the lives and careers of some of the greatest improvisors I know.

You see I came to impro just a few months after Campbell’s death and it seems to me that his absence still defines a part of the London scene. People talk about his theories and opinions all the time, it’s very much ingrained into the fabric of the community. I feel very sad that I came so close to meeting such a great man and in many ways the fact that I didn’t puts me in a different comedy generation to my contemporaries. I’m PC – a Post Campbell improvisor.

Of course, he was much more than just an improvisor. By all accounts he was a genius, a superb writer and performer; a brilliant, erratic, eccentric curmudgeon with a real gift for supporting others. The evening I just spent at the theatre was a bit like him – just off-the-wall, balls out crazy.

For a start it was meant to be just over two hours long and ended up closer to three and a half, the cast a glittering ensemble of powerhouse comic talent from John Sessions to Toby Jones by way of Nina Conti and the guy who played Alf Garnett. Everyone spent the whole evening talking with Campbell’s voice – a kind of a cross between an Essex wide boy and a goblin.

The acts themselves were amazing – monologues and extracts from Campbell’s plays (one of which The Warp is over 22 hours long if performed in its entireity). Someone mimed being bacon frying (ask me to demonstrate), another stripped naked to his socks and copulated with a giant golden apple. There was an inspired sketch revolving around a 20ft long piece of black knicker elastic and an extract from Macbeth translated into Pidgin English.

My favourite moment came from Nina Conti, who was bequeathed all Ken’s ventriloquist puppets in his will. She told us how she had spent the best part of this year “trying to find new voices” for them all. Conti has always been a master of making puppets live and breathe, a strange alchemy where she is almost able to split her soul in two and this was a bravura performance. The last puppet she hauled out of her trunk was a mini version of the man himself. At the very end of her act she begun to pack him away only for mini-Campbell to exclaim loudly “Don’t put me back into another box”.

It was a brilliant moment, both hilarious and heart breaking. Everyone on stage obviously had so much love and respect for the guy but that didn’t stop them scoring a cheap laugh out of his death. You got the feeling that he would have approved entirely. Even after she shut the trunk, he kept protesting in a muffled voice. I still can’t shake the notion that there were two people on stage during that scene.

The evening culminated with the entire cast engaged in an improvised haka, the finest proponent of which (chosen by audience reaction) recieved Campbell’s entire DVD collection of Jackie Chan films*. It was just that sort of an evening.

Certainly not your average night at the theatre.

But then it wasn’t your average life either.

* Ken had been told by the spirit of Laurence Olivier, via a seance, that Jackie Chan was the world’s greatest living actor. His collection of Chan DVDs was so large, it had to be wheeled on stage on a trolley.