"The non-thinking man's Peter Brook"

[shewhomust]

And continuing the "Illuminatus" theme, the highlight of today's Guardian is a profile of Ken Campbell. What I recognised in this article is the breathless exhilaration of trying to keep up with his talk. Here's a sample:

Just as The Great Caper was a thinly disguised autobiographical story of Ion Alexis Will (played on stage by Warren Mitchell), so The Warp was the personal saga of the poet and painter Neil Oram, who still lives on a commune near Loch Ness in Scotland. There were 18 and a half hours of theatre, two one-hour meal breaks and a half-hour beer, sausage and coffee interval at 2.35 am. The cast included an unknown Bill Nighy, an equally unknown Jim Broadbent, Turkish policemen, Chinese officials, Buckminster Fuller, clowns, fire-eaters, military art enthusiasts, a raging landlord ("I don't have any friends; just different classes of enemy") and a comic postman.

Now, compare that to my account of Ken Campbell at the Durham LitFest: yup, same voice!

ETA that the link to the LitFest website is broken because the site no longer maintains archived material.