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Micky Jo Theatre Critic (1:07)

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Can be decreased stress and irritability. Tomorrow. How can you bring components of the 15 minute city of the urban grid, the things people like, the gathering places and beyond. When you start thinking about the future and start thinking about these things are coming in 2030 or 2040 or 2050, then you can go, okay, now how do I actually take actions today to make that happen? Subscribe to in the Loop wherever you get your podcast. ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com I could sit here for the next hour or so and intellectualize about why this piece of theatre works as well as it does. I could tell you how compelling it is as a piece of storytelling, which a lot of other pieces of theatre are. I could tell you about this powerhouse central performance from Jack Holden, the likes of which we have seen on other stages already this year. What I will say about this that I haven't said about a lot of other shows is that honestly, it's just really f cool in a way that not a lot of theater is. A lot of stuff is impressive and remarkable and engaging. Not a lot is this cool. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all Things Theater theatre. As a theatre critic and content creator here on social media, I am currently in the midst of a 12 day stretch of seeing shows every single day before I take a little bit of a festive break. We are also in a busy season for openings because that's just what the shows are trying to do as well. Not that they'll be taking a festive break, but they all want to have their official opening night before the Christmas period. And so critics around the country are seeing by and large a lot of like pantomimes, specifically Christmas shows, or a lot of sort of festive family protest programming, things that are magical and enchanting and joyous and wintry. And Ken Rex, currently playing at the other Palace Theatre in London, is just about none of those things. You know, you've got Christmas countercultural programming and then you've got Kenrex, which is this explosive, multi rolling true crime performance on stage, which is sort of nothing like I've ever seen before. There is some familiarity with solo shows like Baby Reindeer. This is more like what you get if you handed baby reindeer a shrimp shotgun or I guess maybe shot baby reindeer with that shotgun. It's a creative collaboration from writer and performer Jack Holden. And when you get work like this and the lines between writing and performance and direction begin to blur, it feels less like those kind of titles. And we'll talk about who did all of those roles, but it starts to feel more just like the word theater maker becomes appropriate here. And that's always how I've thought of Jack Holden, who has been an actor in other people's plays and who has written plays with other people acting in them, but who has on a couple of occasions now delivered these new innovative solo shows. And I say solo show with an asterisk because he's not the only performer on stage, but he is in both instances thus far, taking charge of the dialogue and the narrative and portraying all of these different characters. The first was Cruise, which was a real gift to audiences as we were emerging from the theatrical shutdown during the pandemic. And the follow up is the tonally completely different Ken Rex, which had a little off West End run at the Southwark Playhouse. It's now playing at a slightly larger venue. The other pal, before what I would imagine is going to be a very exciting future. We're going to talk all about this play today. I will tell you what it is about, I will tell you how it works on stage and I hope to be able to articulate why it is so good of course, if you have had the chance to see it already, then you can help me out in the comment section down below. Please share all of your thoughts about Ken Rex. In the meantime, here are mine if you like listening, make sure to subscribe. Follow me on podcast platforms. Do whatever you have to do so you don't miss any of my many upcoming reviews. Oh there are so many for now, just like they do in the play. Let's talk about Kenrics. So when you walk into the auditorium of the other Palace Theatre, this single tier raked, semi intimate playing space, what you see by way of the playing space is a thrust stage painted entirely green upon which are several props and a couple of set pieces, the whole thing being very rich with theatrical possibility. We are going to do some honest to God storytelling here by way of a desk with music equipment on it, by way of several microphones on stands, by way of some like Perspex drum screens around a chair, by way of a step unit on casters that can be moved around and a screen and various other devices that performer Jack Holden is going to use to grip us tightly for the next couple of hours. Jack is joined on stage by another performer, John Patrick Elliot, who is performing music of his own composition at the back corner of the playing space. Occasionally it contributes to this sort of a cinematic vibe and it just sort of underscores this is very much still a play rather than anything resembling a musical. On other occasions, the music becomes more explicitly required in the narrative. Jack Holden plays one character who sings a song. He plays another character who has a theme song, which is about as cartoonish as it sounds and might seem a little out of place in what I have been describing to you as a very Netflix documentary familiar true crime thriller. And it is that. Tonally, that's exactly what it is, but it's also a theatrical evolution of that that sort of struck me as feeling like making A Murderer meets the Simpsons. If you remember nothing else I say from this review, remember that. Because once I realized it on my second visit to the show last week, having seen it previously at Southwark Playhouse, I couldn't shake that idea that that was the tonal convergence of this. Or it feels like an episode of the Simpsons where everyone's just having a really intensely bad day and the whole thing is contextualized within the framing of a recorded with a member of law enforcement played by Jack Holden, as is the interviewer, which flashes back to a panicked phone call that a wife is making about her husband who has been shot. This being the jumping off point for an explosive story about Ken Rex, who it materializes is a man. His name was Ken Rex McElroy. Like I said, this is true crime. This actually happened. Ken Rex's story has previously been adapted as a book, which was turned into, I think, a TV movie. It has been referenced in popular culture and now it is told through this gripping stage play co written by Jack Holden and Ed Stamboloyan, who is also the director. And the time eventually comes for Jack to portray Kenrex, which he does through this fascinating physicality. We could talk extensively about all of the details of these different characterizations that he brings to life on this stage. And the cartoonish quality of it is, I think, important not only because it would be relentlessly and intensely miserable if there wasn't some sense of levity, which we're only going to find through a little bit of color in these portrayals, but also because it helps us, as do the characterizations and the physicality, to get a sense of who it is we're talking about here. There's a passage of this where we've just become so inundated with the names of different locals and townspeople, after which we don't really meet anybody new except for one important character. We also, I guess, come to find out later on that something of a theatrical trick has been perpetrated here by introducing all of these characters in such a light hearted and cartoonish way as we meet the slightly silly mayor and the vicar. And it's at this point that I'm thinking about the Simpsons, right, But with Ken Rex, it's entirely different. And we learn through the sound, through the lighting and through Jack's physicality that this is a sinister, malicious presence. At the very beginning, even before he tells us about Kendrick's reputation and why he has become the town bully and his dubious past and his criminal activity, he lowers his shoulder to one side and brings the other one up closer to his head. It's this sort of a Richard III meets Mr. Hyde kind of a posture. This asymmetric hunch completed with a very bassy drawl and this pained grimace entirely in contrast to like the vivacious radio dj, the squeaky voiced pastor and the gossipy store worker who we've just met. Now, by this point, we've been introduced through Jack's performance not only to all of the different townspeople, but also where this is taking place. The town of Skidmore. With this really vivid picture of it being established through the narration, we're told that this is a town where locals recognize each other from a distance by the way that they drive their pickup trucks, and crucially, that it is remote enough and small enough that it takes any real police presence more than an hour to arrive from the neighboring town of St. Joseph. The essential focus of the material here is this verbal storytelling. And if you were to sit across a table from Jack Holden as he less theatrically told you this story, it would still be, I'm sure, utterly captivating. But it is elevated far beyond that, not just through his transformative chameleonic performance, but also through the astounding creative collaboration that's happening in the space as well. This musical wizardry that is being curated at all times. You never see John Patrick Elliot stop moving in the same way that Jack Holden doesn't. It's an indefatigable performance from each of them, and it's a very innovative but also very fast paced and demanding show where the technical elements are concerned. Giles Thomas Sound Design has a couple of great surround sound moments that contribute to the overall sense of intimidation that is being found throughout the thing. Just steadily we are getting more and more unsettled as we find ourselves feeling increasingly situated in the town among these increasingly desperate people. Desperate because though he has been the town bully for some time, Ken Rex McElroy's behavior begins to worsen after the inciting event, which is his attendance of the punkin show. Punkin, not pumpkin. That's apparently very important, where he is entranced by the performance of the Star Spangled Banner by a local high school student named Trina McLeod. The brilliance of the one person performance, of it all, being that the Star Spangled Banner is sung atop an elevated part of the set by Jack Holden against a backdrop of video design. With his live vocal eventually ending as the song continues to ring out so he can descend the stairs and then go and watch the silhouette of him that is left as an uncomfortable shadow in the playing space as Kenrecks again adjusting his posture, showing us what we by this point have learned to recognize as his silhouette, watching Trina and just staring at her. Moments later, we learn that Trina is, I think, 14 years old. And though the people of the town offer deliberately little resistance when Ken begins grooming her because they think that this may placate him, in fact it only makes the situation worse. He becomes more volatile towards the other locals, including Trina's family, as well as anyone else who is good natured enough to want to try and help her situation. Because what he now has is an additional Weakness and a vulnerability. Joshua Desaro is the designer of the lighting and video elements that I began to speak about there. And lighting and sound are both so extraordinarily utilized throughout this production. There are a bunch of different handheld microphones that are used for voice editing effects. We hear different sound effects on those, but also they're just used to represent different things. At one moment, Jack Holden is arresting himself at the end of a handheld microphone. At another, these microphone stands become a crowd of people that, you know, try as he might, he can't actually render himself on stage. So we see the scale of them, we see the judgment of them as represented by inwardly facing microphones on microphone stands. That's an aspect of Ed Stamboullian's brilliant direction, which keeps Jack flying around the playing space. And what you have to assume at this point is remarkable muscle memory because it's so smooth, the way that he transitions between each character that he is portraying. And he's like box stepping and square dancing around set pieces as he's moving them between lines of dialogue as we're going in and out of music. One of the most overtly theatrical characters that he portrays in a real demonstration of showmanship is Kenreck's scheming lawyer, Richard McFadden, whose skill at poking at a small perforation of technicality until it becomes a gaping, damaging hole in the case of the prosecution is partnered well by Ken Rex's campaign of intimidation and bullying against anyone who plans to testify against him. That being the explanation that we are given for how he has been able to commit so many crimes with so few convictions. With Richard McFadden's playful theme song punctuated by whip sound effects, it's truly a total, all you can eat buffet is this show. At one point we're trying to clap responses back to percussive rhythms in a barn dance. At another, we are silently stunned as Jack Holden manages to perpetrate an incredibly tense confrontation with. With himself. I've seen so many plays and recently that haven't been able to create a legitimate sense of tension or who have had to cheat. This calls itself a thriller, and it deserves to wholeheartedly, because it is blood pumping intensity established by a single performer threatening himself, having a standoff with himself. And the fact that I am sat there as a grown adult looking at this man and feeling terrified that, you know, I'm like, I don't want him to shoot himself in this standoff that he's having with himself. Or later on, like questioning in the great moral dilemma that eventually emerges. Whether I agree with his perspective on whether he was right to kill himself, or whether I feel sad for the version of him that is mourning the him that he was a minute ago.