Kenrex was the most exciting thing this writer saw on a London stage this year, and that includes Oasis and my children’s school plays. Taking place at Southwark Playhouse, it was a true crime drama about a loathsome hick called Kenrex who terrorises a small town in Missouri, with twists and corruption and different perspectives of townsfolk familiar to podcast fans. But here, all the characters were played by just one man, Jack Holden, only accompanied on stage by musician John Patrick Elliott.
Holden was astonishing, like Peter Sellers performing In Cold Blood live. Word quickly spread about it, and tickets were hard to come by, but now, there’s a chance for many more Londoners to see Kenrex as it moves to The Other Palace from 1 Dec to 1 February for a winter run that will blow many a hat off.
Kenrex was first on stage in Sheffield in October last year, but when they hit London, something caught fire, says Holden: “There was a point, a couple of weeks in, when the whole run sold out. Just suddenly overnight, all the tickets went. It had this intense word of mouth. When people saw it, they were like, I have to tell people about this. It's obviously high tech, with very, very detailed work from the whole design team, but at the core of it, it’s pure theatre, so I'm super excited for more people to see it in a bigger space.”
Kenrex came about after Holden and his co-creator Ed Stambollouian began hunting around for a true crime story to bring to the stage. The genre was huge in the podcast world, less so in theatres. They ended up stumbling across the perfect tale.
“Kenrex follows the completely true story of Ken Rex McElroy's reign of terror over the town of Skidmore, Missouri in the late 70s and early 80s. Ed and I found this story, online. We were like looking for an unsolved true crime story set in the American Midwest. We wanted something to really lean into the genre, and this story struck us because it was unbelievable, really. It's a fundamental story of justice, of right and wrong, but it evolves into the story of good people doing bad things. This town is ruled over by Ken Rex McIlroy for a long, long time, he steals from them, he bullies them, he harasses them, threatens them with his weapons, and then eventually the town decides that enough is enough, and they rise up against him.”
It’s a jaw-dropping set of events but rendered all the more so with Holden playing every character: Ken, the young wife he grooms, an FBI agent, a local Better Call Saul-style attorney, and on it goes. Simply by altering his voice and body, Holden makes each one distinct.
“This real small town of Skidmore had about 400 residents at the time of this story, and I play about 20 of the townsfolk. I differentiate all the characters with slightly different accents and vocal qualities and postures. I don't really do any costume changes, I'm just myself throughout it. It's a real act of imagination for the audience, they have to fill in the blanks.”
He says people often go off searching the real story after having seen the show and are surprised that the different locations aren’t how they pictured them in their heads. While there will be a few extra sound and light elements in the new bigger space, it’ll pretty much be the exact same show as before, which facilitated Holden’s acting with clever sound design and a deceptively minimalist set and lighting, all of which combines to trick your mind into full immersion. Elliott playing a raucous Americana gig alongside him helps too.
Holden says this the result of a lot of time and care, “Ed and I have been developing this show for 7 years. We say we've cooked this show low and slow, so it's a really rich taste.
But then when it came to actually staging it for the first time last year, we had 4 weeks to finally rehearse it and put it together. The key in that phase was making really strong decisions in terms of the characters. So for example, Ken Rex's posture and voice are so distinctive because when it's such a stripped back aesthetic and form - where the architecture is in me, in terms of how I portray the characters to guide the audience through it - those things need to be absolutely crystal clear.”
He compares performing it to a high wire act, where he jump on at the start and doesn’t come off for a couple of hours. In truth, it’s more that he’s a high wire act, ringmaster, clown, strong man and sideshow oddity all rolled into one. Talented as he is, it’s still a risky thing to attempt.
“The very first time we performed it in front of an audience, we really had no idea what people were gonna make of it, whether they were going to stick around for the ride,” Holden says, “It's not a long show but it's quite a long time to spend with one storyteller. We really had no idea how it was gonna go down, but we learned quite quickly the moments that really landed.
There's a moment in the second half, when the defence attorney calls the bar and so there's this ringing phone. He's trying to call a key witness in this case and Ken Rex is in the bar as well. The audience knows that if Ken hears who's on the other end of that phone, it's curtains for the witness, and you can just cut the tension with a knife. It's incredible. And when we first felt that and a subsequent gasp from the audience with what happens next, it was thrilling for us because it meats they've really stuck with the story. We’re definitely very attuned to the audience.”
In order to pull off the performance he says he does go quite monk-like in the run, getting his kicks from audiences alone – “This whole show I'm doing vocal acrobatics, some characters have got incredibly deep voices, some have very high voices, some have very raspy voices, and so it's an athletic event for my voice box.” - and it comes as no surprise to learn that he is a fan of certain comedians
“For me, it started from a childhood place of adoring Jim Carrey and Robin Williams. The ultimate clowns. With my dad, I was always doing accents and impressions and bending my face into kind of grotesque shapes. It's all a continuation of that, really. It's a funny sort of acting because it’s quite clowny, really. Big characters, big caricatures. It's storytelling, not naturalistic acting, but that style of performance and theatre really does interest me.”
He grew up in Tonbridge, the middle son of five boys with “a complex for getting attention”, and this instinctive pull to performing led him to getting a place at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He quickly got his break on stage in War Horse and then with the RSC, but things shifted a notch when he created and performed the one-man play Cruise about the last night on earth of a young gay man dying from HIV. It was nominated for an Olivier Award, and his direction as writer/creator as well as actor was set; with the one-man band aspect his unique trump card.
He is certainly one of the most exciting talents on the theatre scene, and also wrote The Line of Beauty, currently on stage at the Almeida, an adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winning book about a young man exploring the gay scene in London while living at the house of a Tory MP. He says, “I've interpreted it is a Faustian tale of reaping what you sow and betraying your truth in the context of conservativism and the eighties and the AIDS crisis. It's a wonderful book and it's been a pleasure and a privilege to adapt it. Plus it's a real shot of 80s camp and glamour - if you've been enjoying Rivals, you're gonna love The Line of Beauty.”
I ask Holden if he likes to create these daunting challenges for himself, adopting huge novels or taking on one man shows, and he’ll confess to “not really doing easy things.” But how he arrived at this was more out of practical necessity – his writing came out of the pandemic when he thought his acting career might be over. Cruise came out of that time, and he says things simply snowballed: “I think there's something in this phase of my career since the pandemic that's been furiously ambitious and keen to just keep it all going, after it was hanging in the balance. But I don’t want to get a reputation for just doing my own solo shows. I love collaborating!”
With the bit between is teeth expect a lot more from Holden. He hints that Kenrex may well be headed for the States – and he’s also developing more shows with Ed Stambollouian, including a British true crime story which he won’t be performing and another intriguing one that he will. The way he describes it seems to encapsulate Holden’s entire approach:
“It’s basically about space, the final theatrical frontier.”
Kenrex runs from 3 Dec – 1 Feb https://theotherpalace.co.uk/kenrex/ tickets from £25.
