David Benson revisits his extraordinary and obsessive bond with the Carry On legend in a funny and unsettling one-man show.
You can still hear it, can’t you? That fantastic nasal twang – like an outraged gale howling through the adenoidal alps.
“Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it infamy!”
Kenneth Williams’ most famous deprecation was broadly rebutted at the Circle and Star Theatre where the raconteur and actor was revived and lauded, the audience laughing in fond memory of those famous flaring nostrils and Munchian cheeks.
The “Infamy” pun came from Carry On Cleo, in which Williams played Julius Caesar. In this production, he is the centurion as the revival marks the comedian’s 100th birthday on 22 February 1926.
Williams died in 1988 aged just 62 – possibly by his own hand – but his flaming torch has been carried by David Benson whose impressions and re-creations are impeccable, dark and textured.
Benson burst on to the scene 30 years ago with Think No Evil of Us: My Life With Kenneth Williams and he revisits his legendary portrait in this nationwide tour.
Check the title for an accurate summary of this intriguing, if occasionally unbalanced, show.
Stop messing about
It’s My Life With Kenneth Williams. Williams gets second billing. This is especially true of the first act – one for the Boomers as Benson says. He takes us back to the mid-1970s when, as a young lad in Birmingham, he would immerse himself in the stars of the Radio Times. He didn’t want to impersonate them, he wanted to be them – Captain Mainwaring, Eric Morecambe, Peter Sellers, Sergeant Wilson. We get them all, immaculately.
His hero, though, was Spike Milligan. He pored over the scripts of the Goon Show, went to see the great man at the Queen Alexandra Theatre and employed his madcap surrealism to every creative endeavour up to and including his chemistry homework.
The culmination of this fandom was the Milligan-esque story he sent to a Jackanory competition. He won out of 15,000 entries and his entry – about a rag and bone man – was read out by… one Kenneth Williams.
The young Benson was devastated. Williams did the voices wrong, he thought, and, worse, he was so camp. Benson, finally recognising his sexuality, was terrified he would be outed by association.
This extraordinary true tale comes complete with a sing-along school assembly under the direction of irascible Mr Brimley and a genuine recording of Williams reading The Rag and Bone Man. It is played out with great affection by Benson, who creates an atmosphere of bumbling nostalgia and jolly engagement. He is, after all, a writer of pantomimes.
The warmth is in stark contrast to the icy blast that follows.
What a carry on
We have to wait, and wait (perhaps too long) for Kenneth Williams. He arrives in the second act in a few scandalous vignettes that aim to capture not only the star’s vocal range and the endless talking but his unpleasant snobbery and visceral stomach complaints. The logorrhea and diarrhea, one might say.
In this anecdotal show, you come for David Benson and meet, along the way, Kenneth Williams, although perhaps not the Williams you would wish to meet. The former is pleasant company, the other is a self-pitying, self-loathing and casually cruel wretch. Infamy, infamy, Williams might say.
David Benson muses whether his lifelong obsession with Williams is compensation for that first ungrateful reaction. But, he adds, unlike those other 70s heroes, he wouldn’t want to be the troubled, salacious and tortured artist. Not for one minute.
By the end, we understand why. Even Williams couldn’t tolerate himself.
Through all this, Benson is alone and unsupported on the stage except for a chair and a spotlight. And yet one-man show seems too inadequate a description, numerically speaking.
My Life With Kenneth Williams was presented at the Circle and Star Theatre, Hampstead, and is now on nationwide tour.
This review first appeared at The Spy In The Stalls.