MICHAEL COVENEY

The first, authorised biography of the anarchic comic genius, much cherished for his performances on stage and screen.Ken Campbell (19412008) was a one-man whirlwind who tore through the British theatre establishment using well-rehearsed anarchy and a genius for surreal comedy. Starting out in rep at Stoke-on-Trent, he founded the Ken Campbell Road Show, whose members included the then-unknown Bob Hoskins and Sylvester McCoy, and which toured pubs and clubs with dramatised urban myths and shaggy-dog stories.His later shows included Illuminatus! the first show at the National Theatres studio and the 22-hour The Warp, the longest play in the world. On television he played corrupt lawyer Alex Gladwell in the 1970s series Law and Order, and was Alf Garnetts neighbour Fred Johnson in the sitcom In Sickness and in Health. He later found a devoted audience with his mesmerising one-man shows, which he toured worldwide.Ken Campbell became a grand old man of the fringe, though without ever discarding his inner enfant terribleIndependentTheatre critic Michael Coveney was given unrestricted access to Campbells letters, notebooks and original scripts. From these and from interviews with Campbells many devoted/bemused collaborators, he has chronicled the life of the anarchic and uncompromising genius that was Ken Campbell.Alternately inspiring and jaw-dropping, The Great Caper is the story of a unique and inimitable talent in British theatre.

Michael Coveney has been writing theatrical obituaries alongside reviews for several decades and makes a telling, sometimes surprising, selection of the best performers of our time, from Laurence Olivier to Alan Rickman, Peggy Ashcroft to Helen McCrory, Richard Briers to Ken Dodd. Most of these obits appeared in the Guardian, several in the Observer, the Financial Times and the Evening Standard.The fifty articles are arranged in chronological order of each actors demise and constitute a vivid history of postwar theatre through the lives of the actors, the abstract and brief chronicles of the time as Hamlet called them. There are happy/sad juxtapositions of shooting stars Robert Stephens and Alan Bates; tragic niece and aunt, Natasha Richardson and Lynn Redgrave; classical queens Diana Rigg and Barbara Jefford; and versatile showtime hoofers Una Stubbs and Lionel Blair.