Many one-man shows resemble job applications. This is the first time, however, I've seen a job application turned into an evening's entertainment. Using his formal request to run the National Theatre as his starting point, Ken Campbell gives us a potted history of popular entertainment and an attack on what he calls "the law of little imagination".
Some of Campbell's ideas are a touch eccentric. I'm not sure the Olivier Theatre is yet ready for a musical version of Jack London's Call of the Wild with a chorus of singing canines. But, like Shakespeare's Touchstone, Campbell uses his folly like a stalking horse under the presentation of which he "shoots his wit". He's dead right, for instance, that great comics deserve their place on the National stage. Having failed to bring us Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper or Max Wall during their lifetimes, the National should certainly play host to Ken Dodd, still the greatest solo performer in Britain.
Campbell's National would clearly be a fun palace: a place teeming with clowns, circuses and year-round children's shows. He makes a particularly strong case for Anne of Green Gables, which he claims was used as a set text to teach the Japanese English after the war. And, when he showed the Canadian video to selected friends, they allegedly snuffled into their hankies. "Hard guys they were," says Campbell with defiant pride.
Even when one doesn't share Campbell's vision, one must admit he projects it with eye-bulging conviction and immense humour. He dubs directors' theatre "the slowest way of getting a show on" because everything has to go through the great man.
He also calls for a year of weekly rep with instant, actor-led revivals of all the old potboilers such as Dry Rot, Sailor Beware, Wait Until Dark and Black Coffee. But, even though he romanticises weekly rep, there is the gem of an idea here - that there is a whole tradition of popular comedy and farce, stretching back through Philip King, Falkland Cary and Ray Cooney, as worthy of celebration as Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals.
As we know, Campbell didn't get the job. But he has a manic enthusiasm and an archival knowledge of popular theatre that the National should tap into. If I were Nick Hytner I would certainly want to explore the wilder shores of Campbell's vivid theatrical imagination.
