Yesterday in the UN, Russia and China vetoed a motion against the Syrian army murdering its citizens.  Both nations stated that the motion violated Syrian sovereignty. That is to say: both nations not only reserve the right to murder their own citizens but are happy to make this clear to the world.

The background of the vote is no less sordid than the vote itself. It is retaliation against the American vetoes of motions attempting to curb the fratricidal Semite wars and specifically against motions attempting to curb the nuclear arms race triggered by the State of Israel.

The rise of World Anarchism is not surprising. Socialism and Capitalism are equally the formal attire of bloody tyranny.

The ground of all magic, for Redgrove, was the experience that came to him involuntarily, of vision, enhanced senses and sexual reverie. He wanted to live more fully in such experience, and not in the depression that was its obverse. He also sought support and companionship in his religious beliefs: a sense of religious community. He was especially drawn to the modern version of witchcraft known as Wicca, and several times expressed a wish that he could join such a group. He corresponded for a time with the Wiccan practitioners Stewart and Janet Farrar, who were based in Ireland, and (most unusually) had them to stay in the house. As always in his correspondence he was seeking common ground, but he distanced himself from them when he wrote, ‘I think I know some secrets, which present themselves directly to the senses, and with that possibility open, so much of the magical theorising around seems to be a waste of time!’

In 1982 a young student from Sheffield, Cliff Ashcroft, wrote to ask if he could interview Peter. They formed a close bond. Penny thought that this friendship compensated for Peter’s poor relationships with his own sons (whom he never mentioned to Cliff). Cliff went on to write a graduate dissertation which was, surprisingly, the first full-length study to be written, and Peter was both moved and encouraged by its author’s enthusiasm, devotion and insight. It was partly Cliff’s questions that prompted him to write his second book of discursive prose, The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense. But Cliff had a more than literary interest in Peter’s ideas; he contacted a Wicca group, and asked Peter to check this group’s credentials, which he did by consulting the Farrars. Cliff believed that Peter’s ideas were too distinctive and individual for him to be comfortable in any group, and possibly that he was afraid of the effect such a connection might have on his reputation. However, once Cliff himself joined the group Peter became much more open in discussing his ideas, even suggesting in 1987 that they might join together to form a ‘Society for Creative Occultism.’ Eight years earlier he had protested to Robert Nye, ‘I am not, and never have been, in the occult business.’ We might deduce, either that his position changed in those years or that he was deliberately deceiving Nye. The first was certainly not the case, since during year before writing to Nye he had conducted an intensive correspondence with William Webb or ‘Frater Damon’, the leader of an American organization called Q.B.L.H., and would shortly afterwards accept the offer to establish an English branch. This correspondence began when Webb contacted Peter and Penny to congratulate them on The Wise Wound. Q.B.L.H. was one of a number of groups that claimed inheritance from Aleister Crowley, and was based in Peter’s words on Kabbala and sexual alchemy. Peter and Penny took the Q.B.L.H. names Frater S.C. and Soror S.M., whom he later pretended to interview in The Black Goddess. We might have good reason to believe that Peter was deceiving Nye, who was preparing to review The Weddings at Nether Powers, and any suggestion that he was an occultist could further marginalise his work. But it is not as simple as that. Peter adapted his posture and his language with every correspondent to whom he wrote on this subject. Even when writing to people who openly espoused Wicca, Kabbala or other occult systems there is something evasive about his attitude—he is always keeping a loophole open. Even to Cliff, towards whom he felt paternally protective and supportive, and conscious of his responsibility as a revered elder, after suggesting that they might form a circle together, he wrote, ‘It’s possible though that I am so entrenched in my own way that I would just be a nuisance.’ He told the Farrars that he couldn’t join any group that kept its beliefs and practices secret, but he himself bound to secrecy several people to whom he wrote about the occult.

One of Peter’s warmest admirers, with whom he corresponded for many years, was Kathleen Raine, the poet and scholar renowned for her work on the spiritual foundations of Blake and Yeats. Raine had founded the Temenos Academy, which espoused a universal spirituality, with specifically Christian, Platonist and Kabbalistic leanings. She had been a member of the Christian Kabbalistic Society of the Inner Light, founded by Dion Fortune. For a period in 1982 their correspondence became particularly intense, when they agreed at Peter’s suggestion to ‘form a link on the inner.’ In this correspondence he writes as a member of one Order (Q.B.L.H.) to another, addresses her as ‘Soror A.V.A.’, and makes much use of Kabbalistic language. The ‘link on the inner’ meant agreeing at specified times to engage simultaneously in ‘active imagination’. There are a number of letters between them, written on the same day, in which they share their experiences. There is no doubt that Peter had the utmost respect for Kathleen, that he wanted to learn from her—as he did from most of the people with whom he corresponded—and that he was completely sincere about the ‘link on the inner.’ However, the use of Kabbalistic language in his letters is startling. Here is a sample, in which he describes the work he has been doing with Q.B.L.H.:

I have been working out of Geburah towards Chesed for a while now, subsequent to the Wise Wound, which came out of our Path 18, Hod-Netzach…. Every poem is an exercise in travelling the tree, either as serpent or lightning-flash; from the lower Sephiroth of material objects to their resonances on cosmic planes; or from intimations out of the higher planes; our perfected tree is with Malcuth at Daath.

Peter made a number of Kabbalistic ‘trees’ in which he translated Geburah as severity, Chesed as mercy, Hod as glory, Netzach as victory and Malcuth as the Kingdom. So far, he seems to be translating very general concepts into a language that he thinks will find favour with his correspondent. The word Daath, however, represents a fundamental evasiveness in Peter’s correspondence with Kathleen. He had obviously read widely about Kabbala, but the one book that he used to recommend, and the only one specifically on Kabbala in his personal library, was David Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, which had been recommended to him back in the late sixties by ‘Perilla Wymark’. Bakan’s book is a cool and scholarly analysis of the importance of Freud’s Jewish heritage, and especially the Kabbalistic tradition, in the formation of psychoanalysis. What most interested Peter was Bakan’s emphasis on the sexual aspects of Kabbala. Unlike the ascetic mystical traditions of both east and west, the Jewish mystics ascribed sexuality to God. The godhead incorporates the Shekinah, God’s female aspect, and ‘The Jewish Kabbalist saw in the sexual relations between a man and his wife a symbolic fulfilment of the relationship between God and the Shekinah.’ The Zohar, the most important Kabbalistic text, portrays the original man as containing both sexes, which were later separated. Bakan points out that Daath means both knowledge and sexual intercourse, as is well known from the Bible—‘And Adam knew Eve his wife.’ Peter marked both this passage in Bakan and ‘Insight is Daath… knowledge that comes from union… and this kind of knowledge is a deeply erotic experience’ (Bakan’s italics).

For Kathleen Raine spiritual experience had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality. She later confessed to Peter that the direction her life had taken entailed a sacrifice of the sexual energies, which she likened to a castration, and for this reason she could not share his ‘tantric studies’. She told him of a dream in which they were swimming together, in which he caught her by the feet, and tried to pull her down; she was afraid of drowning, but managed to pull him up instead. For Peter on the other hand sexuality is absolutely central to his occult interests. What attracted him to Q.B.L.H. could not have been more different from Kathleen’s refined and Christianised spirituality. His correspondence with Frater Damon is almost entirely about techniques for enhancing sexual experience, especially making it a channel for vision. He several times spoke of his activities in Q.B.L.H. as ‘research’ and, while he certainly took sex extremely seriously and considered it the ground of his work, sexual activity is what his research consisted of. The emphasis in his correspondence with Frater Damon is on heterosexual union, though Peter is occasionally able to hint at the game, as when he writes that ‘At stressful times, physical substances are used to energise the skin, and a rite of re-clothing’, or when he tells another member of Q.B.L.H. about a ‘special rite of KPR [Hebrew for atonement]’ whose ‘inner meaning is extremely secret’, and which is described in his novel The Facilitators—in fact, a revised version of ‘Dance the Putrefact’.

Peter was too sensitive and courteous to write to a woman of Kathleen Raine’s temper about sexual matters in the explicit way he wrote to Frater Damon. Hence the Kabbalistic language serves as a kind of code in his letters to her, and hence also their ‘inner working’ was bound to be limited. After a few months he wrote to her an obscure letter saying that he had ‘noticed things about traditional procedure which have to be discussed in my Order… Until this is resolved I should not practise with another within the tradition I am questioning, I believe.’ Either this is merely a form of words to enable him to slip out of an arrangement that he no longer found helpful, or it is precisely Kathleen’s ‘sacrifice of sexual energies’ that he is questioning.

A more amusing example of Peter’s interest in magic is a correspondence course that he signed up for in 1981, run by Marian Green of Quest magazine. He was sent course materials and wrote assignments which were ‘marked’, literally with ticks in the margin. In one of his assignments he describes what he calls his ‘magical tools and symbols’. These include a black mirror, a crystal globe, a pentacle, paraffin wax, beeswax mixed with male and female sexual fluids, an alabaster chalice, his negative ionizer, an image of the Goddess, an ammonite fossil, a crystalline amethyst geode, a green serpentine vase, rings made of moonstone and silver and haematite and silver, a double spiral of copper, a knife, and tubes of sulphur and salt. He once described them as ‘objects which are present in both worlds, in the unconscious mind or the unknown world and the conscious world as well’.

Bearing in mind who Peter Redgrove was, some of the comments by Marian Green (let alone the ticks) seem rather patronising. For example, when he writes that he has some skills in healing, the ability to see auras, and possibly mediumistic powers, she comments, ‘Most people have these skills but like playing a musical instrument, need practice & training’, and she tells him that he is ‘missing the point in all this complexity.’ He responded to her comments with remarkable humility but, after completing two projects, withdrew from the course, explaining that he had found ‘a very powerful teacher locally.’ Unless it was Penny, this teacher is likely to have been a fiction.

We have seen a pattern of Peter forming connections on the basis of occult interests, but leaving himself a loophole for withdrawal: this happens with Kathleen Raine, Marian Green, even in a small way with Cliff Ashcroft. There is no evidence of a definite withdrawal from Q.B.L.H., though the correspondence lapses after the late eighties. Here too, however, the limits to his commitment are visible. For all his use of Kabbalistic terminology, both in correspondence and in his journals, he thought that Kabbala was potentially obsessive and—unsurprisingly as an English poet—felt incapable of ‘free conversation’ in its language: ‘English is my magick mirror.’ He was suspicious of the tendency of such groups to form around charismatic male leaders, and alienated by the humourlessness of much occult practice: ‘when the senses open for me, what I experience is so extravagant and funny that I have to tell it laughing otherwise it’s not true to what I want to say! This I fear is an unusual quirk, and most people won’t have it, since they like solemnity in spiritual matters.’

Because he was so eager to learn whatever his correspondents had to offer, he was in the habit of writing ingratiatingly to people with occult interests, often in a way that was misleading about the nature of his involvement. For example, to the surrealist writer and artist Ithell Colquhoun he wrote, ‘I was… the pupil of a great adept, John Layard; and had a sexual initiation with another whose name I can’t give, a Sufi. Some eighteen months ago I had a Second Order initiation from a Soror A.V.A. who was trained in Dion Fortune’s group. I have the present task of working within Q.B.L.H. as their English centre under a charter from Frater Damon of that Order.’ His purpose here is to represent a series of important experiences as a regular programme of magical training. Layard had no known occult connections. He was certainly an adept, but not in the way Peter implies here. The ‘sexual initiation’ came from ‘Perilla Wymark’: an influential experience, when he had a vision of the horned God, which he later took to be an image of the womb, but in no sense a formal magical initiation. Soror A.V.A. is Kathleen Raine, and Peter certainly took his ‘inner’ connection with her seriously, but she too would have been surprised to learn that this was an initiation. Similarly the link with Q.B.L.H. was substantial, but Frater Damon’s invitation to form an English branch was far more informal than the rather pompous word ‘charter’ implies. There is no evidence that Peter ever met another member of the organisation in person. None of these experiences involved a formal initiation, and the only training he received, from Layard, was Jungian rather than magical. He was more straightforward when he told the Farrars that Layard was his real basis, and deeper than that was the sexual trance.

For all his genuine exploration of Wicca and other pagan groups, Peter probably found his most fulfilling experience of shared religion in something quite different. Whenever he could he used to visit the ‘Obby Oss’ festival held in Padstow on May Day. From morning till evening, accompanied by repetitive accordion-music, the two ‘Osses’ dance, wearing grotesque masks with little resemblance to horses, and capacious hooped costumes, beneath which, Peter liked to think, young women used to be taken and marked with a tar-brush. He found this celebration deeply moving: the first time he witnessed it he found that ‘Tears were spurting from my eyes like a child.’ He felt that something was happening which had never happened for him in church: ‘the kind of experience when trivial everyday life deepens and seems more solid and important’, giving him ‘a deep feeling of energy, harmony and contentment.’ He clearly felt that he was witnessing an enactment whose symbolism spoke to him as Christian symbolism did not. One may even suspect a displaced Christian feeling in his emotional response to ‘the Oss dying and coming to life again’, and it seems no accident that when he writes that ‘all matters are simultaneously and eternally present’ he strongly echoes Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’: ‘If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.’ Redgrove would probably retort that Christ is not the only god to die and be reborn, and that a pagan-rooted ceremony such as the Obby Oss is closer to the religion of Osiris. Whatever the particular channel through which the religious symbolism spoke to him, he was able to respond so powerfully and uninhibitedly because of the open, spontaneous and popular nature of the event, and its ability to unite ritual and laughter, with none of the solemnity that deterred him from more self-conscious rituals.

from A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (Jonathan Cape, 2012)

Note: ‘Penny’ is poet Penelope Shuttle, co-author with Redgrove of The Wise Wound and author of Redgrove’s Wife.

The Crazy World of Henry Pilk

When Ken Campbell, who loved and wanted to live in Newfoundland, discovered that you could only get your works done if you were a Canadian playwright he did not let that deter him. He created an alter ego writer of short bizarre plays called Henry Pilk and got him registered as an official Canadian playwright. He even opened a bank account in the name of Henry Pilk and signed cheques in his hand. The plays of Henry Pilk are some of the most anarchic, astounding and wacky of all Ken’s output. In this extract from the book SEEKER! KEN CAMPBELL: HIS FIVE AMAZING LIVES
author Jeff Merrifield describes the world of Henry Pilk that Ken created.

Taking over the Madhouse

One day I met Ken in the Stoke Vic theatre bar after a Road Show performance and asked if there was anything new on the horizon. He told me that he had recently met an Irish-Canadian playwright, who had ‘gone off his trolley’. The chap had been sectioned to a mental asylum in Ottawa and Ken had been over to Canada to visit him. He was trying to raise funds for legal matters in relation to getting him officially released. He still wrote plays, lots of them. They were quite short and Ken recounted one of them to me. It was a story of a moral nature, about a young man and his wife, who were attending a dinner party, given by his employer, but in the middle of the evening he started behaving bizarrely. He climbed onto the dinner table, amongst all the food and crockery, and started questioning everybody. After much shouting and abuse, he lifted the lid off the soup tureen, pulled down his trousers and shat in the soup. It was all metaphorical and metaphysical, explained Ken.

That short play was called Total Tango Time and there were many more, a whole tea chest full, Ken claimed. The man was called Pilk, Henry Pilk, and he was regarded as something of a genius playwright. One day, he just flipped out, went crazy, and started behaving in strangely alarming ways. His plays were, in fact, autobiographical, including Total Tango Time. When I asked how he had come to hear about such a man man and his plays, Ken looked me squarely in the eyes, gave a little wink and said, “I made him up.”

Everything – the idea, the man, his exotic history, the tea chest full of plays he was said to have written – all came from Ken’s fertile imagination. He had related this with such conviction and with such unhurried detail, that it was hard to see it as anything but true, that the visit to the Canadian asylum had actually taken place, that there was a huge box of plays. This was a clear demonstration of the amount of meticulous detail that went into the germination and development of one of Ken’s newly formed ideas. As a part of his creative expression he processed and reprocessed a vast amount of material, before it finally emerged as a theatrical production. In this instance, he had written the Pilk plays, and given the man a history, as a playwright, now incarcerated in a mental asylum. Pilk would become an alter ego figure for Ken and he even had one of his bank accounts registered in that name, ready for any royalties that might accrue from other productions of the Pilk plays.

The real genesis of ‘Henry Pilk’ was no less bizarre than the version Ken had told me in theVictoria bar. The Road Show had been resident in Dublinand Ken made the acquaintance of a crazed, often drunken, Irish actor by the name of Alan Devlin. He liked the man and he went into Ken’s mental notebook as a possible future resource. Soon after this, Ken went to New York and Toronto to seek possible work for the Road Show. New York was not so profitable, whereas Toronto did have a flourishing theatrical fringe movement. However, they only ever performed Canadian material.

One night, whilst at the Theatre Passe-Muraille, Ken had met Paul Thompson, the theatre’s artistic director, who was much revered on the Canadian theatre scene. Ken said that he understood that there was a restriction to Canadian material and performers, but asked how it would be if he ‘invented’ a Canadian playwright and then formed a company, some Canadian, some British actors, to perform his work. That, it seemed, might be all right. On the return journey, the idea of a new Canadian playwright became juxtaposed with earlier escapades that Ken had with Alan Devlin – and Henry Pilk was born.

The fruits of a painstaking preparation were soon evident as the show based on Henry Pilk’s works went into production. The first performances were at the Theatre Passe-Muraille in Torono and then at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, before extensive touring. The cast was part British, part Canadian, performing the ‘Pilk’ plays that Ken had written – and maybe there was almost a tea chest full.

Here is a list of some Henry Pilk plays I found in one of Ken’s archive boxes he kept his old work in:

Plays by Henry Pilk:

THE CHICKEN BOY

HOME

AS FORETOLD IN MY DREAM

ROOM

FALSE JOURNEY

THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED UP HIS OWN ARSEHOLE

TOTAL TANGO TIME

TWO HUSBANDS

I’M THE SAME ME BUT EVERY SO OFTEN IT’S A DIFFERENT YOU

PLAYBOY OF THE SORROWS

AS FORETOLD IN MY DREAM

BASEBALL NYMPH – A FOUND MORALITY PLAY

CRIPPLED

THE HAMMER TOE

FORKIN’ ‘ELL

THE WOOPING DOWNSTAIRS

THE CASE OF THE HOMICIDAL NYMPHOMANIAC

LITTLE SISTER – PUTRID PIECE No. 33

CONNEMARA BOY

THE MUCKSHIFTER

FALSE JOURNEY

THE MAN WHO COULDN’T TELL THE DIFFERENCE

THE DIMINISHING MEN

TOSSED OFF

REVEREND PLEASURE (FATHER FUN)

Plus some old Road Show scripts, from the Modern Myths era, that crept into the Pilk repertoire:

THE MONUMENT

BISCUIT TIN

COURT INCIDENT

THE PERFECT MURDER

THE CAPTAIN’S COCOA

THE AUTHORITY ON POT

THE NOVITIATE AND THE ABBOTT

THE LADY WITH A SPOT ON HER BOT

These plays range from the self-consciously literary (Baseball Nymph  – a found morality play) to those of a vaudevillian style (Two Husbands – a skilful vignette of two men invisible to each other) and the aforementioned Total Tango Time, where a young man attending a dinner party at the home of his employer climbs on a table and shits in the soup tureen – it contains the memorable lines: ‘And the death and rebirth of the new universe – so let us dance the Dance of death – take your partners for the Madness Boogie – dunk your tits in the custard Mother – it’s Disintegration Day!’

The plays were between one page and twenty pages in length and covered a wide range of philosophical concepts. For example, one of the one page scripts was entitled Crippled and was a moral tale about rewarding initiative:

BEGGAR (calling)  Give generously to a poor blind beggar!

GENT                       There you are.

Pops coin in beggar’s hat

BEGGAR                 Only 5p!

GENT                       How do you know it’s only 5p if you’re blind?!
I’ll have that back thank you!

BEGGAR                 Sorry, did I say blind? – I meant dumb.

GENT                       If you can say dumb, you are not dumb!

BEGGAR (hopefully)  Deaf?

GENT                       Bah!

Takes his 5p and goes

BEGGAR (chasing after him)  Stupid?

Beggar stamps his foot in a temper – twists ankle

BEGGAR (triumphant)  Give generously to a poor

crippled beggar!

Of the material from the earlier Road Shows, there were also short pieces, including single page scripts, that sat easily alongside the Pilk offerings, such as The Authority on Pot, which explored the idea of authority in relation to attitudes about cannabis or marijuana:

MAGISTRATE        Have you the piece of cannabis found on the defendant?

OFFICER                Yes, you honour.

MAGISTRATE        Has an analyst verified that it is in fact cannabis?

OFFICER                We have been unable to obtain a copy of the analyst’s report just yet.

MAGISTRATE        How do you know then that it is cannabis?

OFFICER                When I smelled the substance, I decided it
was cannabis.

MAGISTRATE            May I see it? I think I shall be able to  tell
whether  or not it is cannabis.

OFFICER HANDS THE SUBSTANCE TO THE MAGISTRATE, WHO SNIFFS IT, LICKS IT, LICKS IT AGAIN, PUTS IT IN HIS MOUTH, SUCKS IT, TAKES IT OUT.

MAGISTRATE            Yes, I am satisfied that it is cannabis. Where
did you find it?

OFFICER                    Up the defendant’s rectum, your honour.

Of course, some were based on shabby old jokes, gags that Ken had picked up here and there, but the collected plays of Henry Pilk were presented as ‘an evening of intellectual slapstick’, by The Pilk’s Madhouse Company, complete with many erudite quotations and recommendations from people, who were also more likely than not to have been ‘made up’ – ‘The human mind was not meant to travel at these velocities’- Wolynski.

In the publicity material, there was much reference to madness and psychiatric states, in pithy statements from Pilk: ‘Home movies of the darkest corners of your psyche’; ‘The answer is muck and the movement of muck’; and the most used phrase of all, that eventually became Pilk’s catchphrase: ‘Who is real in this Hall of Mirrors?’

This was a thoroughly well conceived Campbell caper, thought through from start to finish. Instead of writing a play, he had invented a playwright and structured the evening’s entertainment around the ‘made up’ person. This worked on several levels. Firstly, it was an investigation of truth. Some reviewers, and no doubt some audience members, thought that Henry Pilk was indeed the writer behind these works. The act of opening a bank account for a fictional figure, and his later inclusion in a directory of Canadian authors and playwrights, further blurred the separation of fact and fiction, which helped Ken keep this subterfuge active for over thirty years. Secondly, it was an exploration on the nature of madness, the ‘reminder that the demarcation line between sanity and madness is precariously thin’, as was remarked in a review of the touring version of the show in the North Devon Journal.

Madness was a subject that Ken would return to at other times. In 1985, he wrote an impressive television script for Channel 4 called The Madness Museum, which was based on the treatment of patients in a nineteenth-century asylum. He appeared in the programme in the role of the master of the asylum, with John Sessions playing an assistant, newly arrived. The new assistant was taken on a tour of the asylum, to see the many patented ‘cures’, including a woman with a birdcage over her head, so that birds could stimulate her brain, and patients taking part in the ‘early morning vomits’. That programme was part of a series about mental health and Ken’s script explored, more effectively than most, the way that treatments for mental illness were sometimes crazier than the illnesses they attempted to cure. In years to come, the use of ECT will no doubt be regarded as stupid as the birdcage therapy.

One of the strands running through The Warp was the defining processes of sanity and of madness, with several of the characters suffering greatly at the hands of institutionalised psychiatry, including the infliction of ECT. In 1992 Ken wrote a special piece for a Glad to be Mad festival, as well as interviewing Michael Fagan at that same event. Fagan it was who broke into the Queen’s bedroom and was later declared insane and sectioned to an asylum. Following that interview, Ken developed a theory that Fagan was sectioned probably because of what he discovered about the Queen, rather than his own state of mind, and that the seemingly bizarre conjecture of David Icke about the reptilian nature of royal bloodlines might have actually been witnessed by Fagan. Icke’s claim was that ‘ancient accounts’ revealed hybrid bloodlines, a fusion of genes of selected humans with high-ranking supra-terrestrials, possibly Illuminati in origin, and of a reptilian appearance, which were then put into the positions of ruling power. These bloodlines later became the royal and aristocratic families of Europe. Ken surmised that Fagan encountered the Queen in her reptilian state and that was why he was incarcerated in an asylum instead of put into prison. We’ll never really know.

There was much confusion and utter bewilderment about Pilk’s Madhouse, because there was no restraint on how the subject was masqueraded. Henry Pilk was laid bare, his madness exposed and an often repeated query reminded us of the potential insanity in everyone – ‘Who is real in this Hall of Mirrors?’ The Time Out reviewer, who chose to remain anonymous, was scathing and forthright in his opinion:

There are certain things I don’t find funny. Among them are portrayals of insanity and artists in whatever medium who suffer from an ‘ability gap’ – those who can’t find an objective expression of their private vision… Ken Campbell’s new show had the unhappy effect of basing all its humour on subjects like these – the appearance of double personalities in schizophrenics, spoof discussions of the merits of a fictitious cult writer – where, in order to laugh, the audience had to make some pretty offensive value judgements. At times it seemed like the company were hell bent on setting a new record in bad taste… I couldn’t help regretting that the group, which had built up such a reputation for good, funny, popular and accessible productions, had gone so deeply introspective that it was in danger of disappearing up its own arse.

It seemed that all was well for Ken if he stuck to the ‘bar room tales’ and the tittering end of comedy, but if he should try to be ‘introspective’, he was responsible for the audience having to ‘make some pretty offensive value judgements’. Ken had invariably looked at the possibility for irony in the actor-audience relationship. In Old King Cole, the ‘dirty deeds’ undertaken by the Amazing Faz and his feeble-mined assistant Twoo were to help the weedy Baron Wadd win a sporting contest against sporty Cyril the Fiddler, to win the hand in marriage of Princess Drippy Daphne. The Baron was so weedy the audience felt sorry for him, and Faz and Twoo had already established themselves as protagonists, as amiable rogues. The audience, therefore, found themselves cheering enthusiastically for the people who were blatantly cheating rotters. Children identified with that, they cheered and cheered – so much so that at the first performance in Stoke, Peter Cheeseman became alarmed – “He feared that the mass hysteria that the play was creating could be dangerous,” said Ken. It was one of those delicious moments of theatre that he seemed to have a knack for creating. Pilk was asking the audience to question their response to the idea of madness, not to ponder on it, but to find enjoyment in the human predicament – it’s not true unless it makes you laugh.

The Canadian reviewers were perhaps kinder to the production than the British ones. Writing in the Ontario Globe and Mail, Herbert Whittaker noted that ‘Pilk shows the influence of the more vulgar English surrealists’ and whilst noting that this was not a show for all audiences, pointed out that it was ‘for all those who are in hot pursuit of the Canadian dramatist in all walks of life’. DuBarry Campau in the Toronto News thought that some of the pieces were ‘marvellously funny’, whilst others were ‘blatantly and defiantly vulgar to the point of being physically revolting’. Back in this country, Charles Lewsen, in The Times, thought the pieces presented were ‘not parody, but straightforward meaty indulgence in expressionism’ and that ‘this sorts well with Campbell’s aim to create popular theatre – in which, presumably, full-blooded comedy and sentiment can co-exist’. He did point out, though, that he doubted if the ‘games of parody’ would work in a ‘less rarefied atmosphere than that of Sloane Square’. And Michael Billington was not amused:

The basic idea is that we are watching a series of sketches by one Henry Pilk, poet, madman and drunk. But although the items are all linked by the theme of mental derangement and the image of Pilk as a poor man’s Ezra Pound is carefully sustained, the level of comic invention is woefully poor.

Billington goes on to say that Ken Campbell’s Road Show had always seemed one of the ‘liveliest of troupes’ with roots firmly planted in ‘bar room tales, the music hall and the world of fairground stumps’. Agreeing with Charles Lewsen about its polite reception in Sloane Square, he does not see this Pilk material playing well in the back bar of a northern pub. Michael Coveney thought that Pilk was pressing for ‘a world where everyone realises their full glandular potential, where filth is seen as a beautiful manifestation of natural cycles… and where ideas bred on the Funny Farm are allowed to thrive’. He also said that he found it ‘difficult to enjoy and harder to recommend’.

The Daily Telegraph correspondent thought that a few of the ideas were ‘promising… and some of the more cerebral sketches decidedly clever’, but found this Campbell show to be ‘less roisterous than usual’.  Whilst the Evening Standard correspondent noted that since its opening in late December, the show had acquired, by early January, audience members ‘obviously on their umpteenth visit’, Robert Brustein, writing in the Observer, thought that it was like ‘participating in bedlam’:

[The Pilk’s Madhouse] group, which seems to operate almost entirely on raw nerve, is making an effort to translate mental disorder into its theatrical equivalent… the final effect of the evening is chaotic. Still, this audacious company might be onto something interesting; and its capacity to unsettle the spectator over who is real and who is a plant is a technique that could benefit the people associated with the Osborne play a few flights down at the Court.

This latter reference to John Osborne was about his play A Sense of Detachment, playing concurrently in the Royal Court main house downstairs, where the playwright had consciously written in a series of interruptions by actors planted in the audience and actors walking off the stage into the auditorium. It was not regarded as one of Osborne’s better theatrical efforts and his attempt to write in ‘spontaneity’ had resulted in unconvincing and feeble performances. The Observer’s Brustein obviously thought that the crossing of the actor-audience barrier was accomplished much more convincingly in Ken’s Madhouse. A number of critics thought that the Madhouse production did not hang together, that it was just a collection of short pieces, several sketches or skits, which were unconnected. There might have been something of a sling ‘em on sort of approach, but if there was, it was more to do with putting a production together quickly, on a limited budget, than it was about lack of attention to detail and material.

I was personally most disappointed that more of the critics did not make reference to the presence of David Sewall, in the Madhouse company. He had been in one of the earlier Road Show companies and had toured Germany with them. The story of his arrival was, according to Ken, ‘a good’un’.

Apparently, Gavin Richards and Marcel Steiner were round at Ken’s house, the three of them trying to write new material for the Road Show. They were having difficulty thinking up anything funny and were about to call it a day, when the doorbell rang. Standing there was a man in full evening dress, with open-toed sandals, two violin cases and pink toilet paper in his buttonhole. He had come from Canada, having heard about Ken Campbell, and turned out to be a musical genius, who could sing a full opera with passion and play his violin simultaneously, with a manic intensity. These one-man opera performances had become a feature of restaurants and bars in many parts of Canada, though he would usually get sacked for being too intense for customers. In the context of the Madhouse, he was an unforgettable performer, a comic genius to be cherished amongst the best of them. He was a consummate presence in the Pilk’s Madhouse Company.

The show toured extensively to many parts of Britain, after the Royal Court production and before being adopted by Marc Weil, a young actor, who toured it for several years round Canada and the USA. Taking on the guise of a ‘Wild Stunt Show’, this touring version played up the frenetic nature of the material and was received in that spirit – ‘Dirtier than the Marx Brothers’, thought the Philadelphia World, and a mixture of ‘pathos, passion, and porn’ was the view of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. It acquired something of a legendary status on these tours and later was given a seriously budgeted, deliberately rehearsed, considered and respectful production at the Empty Space theatre in Seattle. The quality of the work was more fully realised and the seriousness of Ken’s original intent was revealed in this production. Steve Winn, in the Seattle Chronicle, wrote:

Various as the scenes are in tone – from a dank black comedy about a woman severely burned in a fire, to the very lightest sort of humour – they share an easy, almost playful quality. What if, Pilk muses, a homicidal nymphomaniac were to visit a doctor to seek counsel for her sexual problems? Or what if an actor, home from a day at work, were suddenly to become paralyzingly conscious of his own trained voice and mannerisms? The play, just in the conception of the scenes, captures the perversely hypothetical twist of our minds… More darkly, more deeply the play may suggest a grim pattern of cuckoldry, humiliation, hopeless inadequacy. But Madhouse doesn’t really pretend to that sort of thing. Rather it invites us to witness the way a mind sleds over the surface, skirts the matter, faces it dead on, then shrugs and carries on.

The English critics could have learned a thing or two from such a considered review. Same material, remember, as they had been so scathing of. Once the material was taken out the mentality of a Road Show scenario, with consequent raised expectations of slapstick comedy and knockabout humour, the underlying seriousness of the writing was more evident. What had been regarded as ‘physically revolting’ in the knockabout, was regarded, in this more formal and rarefied context, as considered deliberation and a sober attempt to ask serious questions about the human condition. Thus it appeared that Ken was not allowed to have serious undertones in Britain, being too closely associated with knockabout comedy. On the North American continent it was different. Wayne Johnson, arts editor of the Seattle Times, found Pilk’s Madhouse ‘loony, mad, but it also has touching moments within its grotesqueries’. He pointed out that the Empty Space theatre had a solid reputation for consistently accomplished work with interesting, frequently offbeat scripts – ‘that reputation is bolstered by the Empty Space’s new major premiere production of Pilk’s Madhouse’.

In the Seattle production, reviewers referred to ‘a play’, whereas the ‘wild stunt show’ or ‘road show’ productions had largely been regarded as a series of sketches or skits, which greatly pained Ken, as an extract from an eccentric letter to Guy F Claude Hamel in Toronto revealed. Hamel wrote to ‘Henry Pilk’ at Ken’s address in Haverstock Hill, his letter including a picture of Hamel in the role of Pope Claudius the First. He was asking if Pilk would like to be included in a book of Canadian playwrights and to send an autobiography and two 10” x 8” photos. Ken replied on his behalf:

Dear Guy F Claude Hamel

Thank you for your pompous letter with the nauseating pic. To be honest I couldn’t give a shit whether I am in your book or not. In fact you wouldn’t be getting any reply at all if it was down to me. But Ken Campbell insists that I should reply at least, and since the perturbed idiot has supplied me with half a bottle of Johnnie Walker and is sitting there typing out any bollix I care to come out with…

I was born in Cabbagetown 1945, 8 brothers and 8 sisters, Dad died of drink when I was five, which was a great release for us all – he was an awful old bollix. I was shipped back to Dublin to live with my nasty Aunt Hannah. Englishmen are bollix, Canadians are double bollix. What is this bollix book? I haven’t written anything, anyway… Campbell wrote it all. NO HE DIDN’T!!! I wrote it. I mean I just wrote it, but he parcelled it up.  And now I’m an exhibit!

[three pages later]…     The thoughts are all mine, I OWN ALL THE THOUGHTS!  And a lot of the dialogue. In fact most of the dialogue. In fact all the fucking dialogue. Bar one or two lines. Bar one or two mouldy lines. In fact I did write it all you could say. Never mind “you could say”. I did write it. I DID WRITE THE FUCKING STUFF – SO WHAT’S THE OBJECTION? WHAT’S THE POINT YOU ARE TRYING TO MAKE? … Do you ever hear disembodied voices, Mr Pilk? Yes, frequently. When do you hear them? When I am on the telephone. If you invite me to the launch party of CANADIAN PLAYWRIGHTS I promise to shit in the sherry.

[two further pages]…     I’ll talk about my work now, I think. Just because my plays are only three or four minutes long DOES NOT MEAN THEY ARE SKETCHES. They are NOT SKITS. They are PLAYS. Got it? Short plays. Anyone referring to THEM AS SKITS WILL BE HOODED AND SHOT. They are plays. Plays. These fucking things are plays. Say to fucking Samuel Beckett, having seen one of his half-minute masterpieces: “Very biting little skit that, Sam.” You know what he’d say? He’d say, “Fuck off cunt!” SO WE’VE GOT THAT STRAIGHT, HAVE WE?… It won’t just be a merry little sherry shitting scandal at the Launching Party, if I find the word SKIT on my page in your book.

There were pages and pages more – in one way an insane rant, in another, most revealing about the writer and his utter passion for the material. It was also another blurring of the distinction between Ken Campbell and Henry Pilk – who is real in the Hall of Mirrors? And it was a lashing out at all the shit he’d had to take from British critics. The correspondence continued for several months, at the same intense and frenetic rate. I found it housed in a special Campbell archive box called The Incredible Pope Hamel Affair of 1973.

Ken had something of a reputation, around this time of the Madhouse, for ringing people up at various times of the day or night, though more usually late at night, and raving about some new idea or notion. He would have probably consumed some quantity of Johnnie Walker. (“Let me warn you young people about that last inch in a bottle of whiskey,”Campbell said in one of his solo shows. “Up to that point everything is fine, but just try not drinking that last inch.”)

When I interviewed Richard Eyre, the former artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal National Theatre, who had co-operated on many productions with Ken, the first thing he mentioned was the late night phone calls. He even wrote about them in his book, Utopia & Other Places –

Ken’s evangelism, his great enthusiasms of the moment, can sometimes be hard to endure, particularly on the phone at one o’clock in the morning: Gerry Webb of Space Consultancy and Interplanetary Travel, EST, Max Wall, Spike Jones, Ian Dury, Charles Fort (the visionary, not the hotelier), Robert McKee the script doctor, the Royal Dickens Theatre, the underwater show in the Liverpool swimming pool, the office on the Essex marshes, Werner the dog… There is no one who seizes the moment with quite so much enthusiasm and is quite so relentless at wanting to share it with others.

Looking back, I particularly remember the conversation in a theatre bar, where Ken told me about Henry Pilk and his tea chest full of plays. The most enduring aspect of that memory is the absolute conviction that Ken showed in his recounting of the tale. If this material was a consideration of truth and illusion, then there was nothing but truth in the way the story had been formulated and told. The truth was in the telling. Probably the best compliment, as far as Ken was concerned, came from another American journalist, when he described his work as ‘reminiscent of R Crumb, the West Coast cartoonist’. That was almost better than appearing in The Beano.

Pilk’s Madhouse was important to Ken, the one show that remained in production for a significant length of time, with a number of touring productions around the world. There was even a German version, Mr Pilk’s Irrenhaus, performed at the Schauspiel in Cologne, with an accompanying cast recording of songs. Henry Pilk may have once been the alter ego of Ken Campbell, but over the years the distinctions had become blurred and it was sometimes difficult to tell the one from the other.

from
SEEKER! Ken Campbell: his five amazing lives 

www.playbackarts.co.uk

What is an antipoet?

an urn-dealer? an undertaker?
a self-doubting general?
a nihilistic priest?
a streetdrinker who scoffs
at everything, old age, death?
a boor? a ranter?
a ballet dancer on a cliff-edge?
an NPD sufferer
in love with universals?
a poet
who sleeps on thrones?
an all-mod-cons alchemist?
a living room insurgent?
a petit-bourgeois?
a phoney? a deity?
a child of Eden?
a peasant in Santiago, Chile?

(Underline the phrase you think is correct.)

What is antipoetry?

a storm in a teacup?
a snowflake on a boulder?
a human excrement tossed salad
as the Franciscans think?
a truth-attack mirror?
an open-legged lady?
a gob in the face
of the President of the Writers’ Society?
(God bless him and save him)
a lesson to younger poets?
a motorised coffin?
a revolving coffin?
a gas-fuelled coffin?
a corpse-less undertakers?

(Tick the definition you think is correct.)

Translation by Niall McDevitt

let us celebrate Dickens—England’s conscience—

as young NEDs (sorry) NEETs have no prospects

but to be stopped searched and stripped of benefits

by Gradgrinds Scrooges and Dedlocks

let us commemorate all things Dickensian

as the ‘Kosovo-style’ clean-up commences 

and losers are mopped off the A to Z

to make his London fit for gold medallists

let us sentimentalise Dickens’ creations

as the disabled are forced to take physical tests

and in a warped schmaltz denouement

declared fit as fiddlers able-bodied men and women

let us even enshrine Dickens in moral law

as legal aid is withdrawn from the poor

and Kafkaesque barriers are erected

saying: NO ROOM AT THE INNS

(Note: NED is Scottish for ‘non-educated delinquent’. NEET is English for ‘not in education or training’.)

One morning, not that long ago, I answered the door in my dressing gown to the sight of a man from the energy company. He came to ask me why I had chosen to switch suppliers. As I explained that I preferred one with a better environmental policy, I slowly realised that not only did this guy have gorgeous eyes, he was watching me closely. I went on to say, performing a bit for this beautiful man, “Of course all corporations and really capitalism in general is bad for the environment”. He agreed, his eyes glowing with excitement. But, what could he do? He had a mortgage to pay. I’m not quite sure why, maybe I was scared of the intensity of my attraction, but suddenly I found myself channeling some broken record of anarchist propaganda and said, “We need resistance on the inside, too.” That was it. His beautiful eyes looked away and the connection was lost.

I feel grief remembering that morning; I would have liked to have listened with empathy to both his desire for change and for security, to maintained that beautiful sense of connection. Instead, I tried to recruit him. When I replay the incident in my mind, it has a different ending. I ask him, “What would you like to do?”

‘Escape’ (2009) from Female Genital Mutilation

Gregory Motton – A Butcher of Presumptions

Review by Beryl Bainbridge of Helping Themselves – The Left wing Middle Classes in
Theatre and the Arts                                    

I think this book may be brilliant, it is certainly disturbing. It reads like a handbook for
rebellion against the theatre and academic and political establishments; Its opening paragraph doesn’t pull punches:

“The past four decades have seen a social revolution. It is part of the propaganda victory of the new middle class establishment that they have managed to present their rise to ascendancy as a popular movement, and to associate it in people’s minds with socialism, and, by extension, with the working classes. This impression is false.”

With these 56 words Motton rejects the presumption that the past 40 years has seen a move towards greater liberalism – The apparent march to social freedom Motton sees as a revolution of the prosperous middle classes, who snatched power from the class above them; they remade society to do it, and it was the poor who paid the price. Effectively this stands conventional politics on its head. Modern Leftwingism, says Motton, is anti-working class.

Motton puts this in the context of the huge increase in poverty since the 1970s, including 13 years under Labour. In 1979, 2 percent were on very low income; now it’s 9 percent – no policy shift between Conservatives and Labour – and the betrayal began under the Wilson government. Social conditions too have changed for the worse, a fact denied or ignored by middle class “socialists”. A surge of violence has made many of the working classes, especially children, afraid to leave their homes. There are 80,000 people in prison, most of them are working class. But the plight of the poorest hardly featured in the election campaign.

The stealing of the Labour party by the middle classes is central to this process. Modern Leftwingism is a doctrine which serves the material needs of the non-conservative middle classes, and their self image – but has little to do with the working classes, whom, in Motton’s opinion, they generally despise. Motton writes with wit and clarity about the doctrine from Rousseau to Marx to Althusser and Marcuse. He points out that the working class movement in Britain would have been more successful without any of them, and reminds us that Socialism came before Marxism, not the other way around, – and it must mean the working classes fighting for their own interests.

The book describes how the presumptions of conventional modern enlightened thinking (much of which Motton dares to challenge) transformed our society from a peaceful, safe one, into a violent one. He traces them back to some of their earlier manifestations, giving the book an, at first, curious seeming range of topics, from art critic Herbert Read, to the Oz Trial of the 1970s, Concept Art (there’s a penetrating chapter on the visual arts), Freud (a fraud), and violence in the theatre and television. But it gives us a painful tour of left wing middle class opinion.

In an entertaining chapter on the Royal Court, he reveals the expensive public schools behind the fake working class posture of most of its leading lights of the 1960s and 70s, and puts their self-styled political radicalism in the illuminating and damning context of the Labour movement which too had by that time been taken over by the middle classes. – According to Motton this led to the betrayal of the unions by Labour; When the unions tried to get a bigger slice of the pie, their wage claims were seen by the Labour government as inflationary; Motton argues, against modern left wing wisdom, that it was the bosses who were inflationary when they passed the wage rises back as price rises; A working class government would have supported the unions; – It was a turning point; He attributes continuing poverty in Britain to the lack, even then, of a working class Labour movement.

The middle class leftwingism in the theatre of the 1970s and 80s grew easily into what Motton calls “collaborators theatre” of violence and amoral individualism of the 1990s; “Radicalism” eagerly combined with fashion, which it continues to follow; theatre doesnt criticise society, it merely ingratiates itself with so-called popular culture. Its failure to treat violence as anything more than a game earns Motton’s particular censure. Sarah Kane and In-Yer-Face theatre, come in for fierce criticism; Motton is never afraid to attack the sacred cows, he is a butcher of presumptions. And despite a remarkable consistency in his thought, you never know from which direction he will approach.

There is a forthright attack too on academia; Motton, in a fascinating section on education, denounces deconstructionismas a new establishment tool to make rebellion in the arts almost impossible, by effectively silencing the text and taking away from the writer the power to rebel. Motton recommends students to take direct action against it.

Motton says that while Labour leaders despise their working class supporters as bigots, the middle class left might still miss the point of their electoral defeat. Already in theatre they are dusting down the self-righteous clichés from their last period of opposition. Motton’s liberating analysis, in a witty and impassioned way, tears to pieces the idea that the middle class left help anyone but themselves. It points the way forward to a rebellion against them in the arts, and in theatre, and in education, and reminds us of the possibility of a genuine working class labour movement.

This is a clever and controversial book, – it challenges the orthodox views that we the middle classes have somehow mistakenly clung to for the last 40 years

Book published by levellers press price £10
ISBN9780956436405,
levellerspress@yahoo.co.uk,

Editor’s note: this review was written by Beryl Bainbridge on her deathbed but was rejected by The Guardian.