Ken Campbell

Ken Campbell, who has died suddenly aged 66, was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre of the past half-century. He was a writer, director and monologist, a genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing the improvisational capabilities of the actors who were brave enough to work with him.

An Essex boy who trained at Rada, he never joined the establishment, though his 1976 play Illuminatus! (co-written with Chris Langham) - an eight-hour epic based on an American sci-fi trilogy - was the first production in the National Theatre's Cottesloe auditorium, with a prologue spoken by John Gielgud. His official posts included a brief spell as artistic director of the Liverpool Everyman in 1980 and a professorship in ventriloquism at Rada.

He was first renowned in the early 1970s for the Ken Campbell Road Show, in which a company including Bob Hoskins, Jane Wood, Andy Andrews, Dave Hill and Sylvester McCoy ("The Human Bomb") enacted barroom tales of sexual and psychic mayhem while banging nails up their noses and stuffing ferrets down their trousers.

Even more remarkable than Illuminatus! was his 10-play (22-hour) hippy extravaganza, The Warp (1979), a sort of acid Archers co-written with the poet Neil Oram. The protagonist's search for his own female consciousness took him from 15th-century Bavaria to a flying-saucer conference in 1968. Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent were among the cast of unknowns; characters included 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.

The Warp - subsequently revived as a rave-music production near London Bridge by Ken's daughter, Daisy Campbell - was followed in 1980 with a magnificent hoax which seemed to encapsulate the challenge of "What next?" The theatre world was flooded with invitations from Trevor Nunn to come aboard the newly formed Royal Dickens Company in the wake of the RSC's hugely successful Nicholas Nickleby; Shakespeare was being dropped for Dickens, and offers were made on meticulously reproduced company notepaper, all apparently signed by Nunn ("Love, Trev").

Nunn's embarrassment was compounded by the fact that a lot of people had written back to him refusing, or even more disconcertingly, accepting his gushing "offers" of work on Snoo Wilson's Little Dorrit or Michael Bogdanov's equally specious Sketches By Boz. After a couple of weeks of panic and speculation in the press, Campbell owned up.
There have been few stranger people in Britain, let alone the theatre, than Campbell. Living in a Swiss chalet in Epping Forest, he trained his three black crossbreed dogs - Max, Gertie and Bear - to win prizes, made art work from the random droppings of a parrot called Doris and entertained his visitors with the films of Jackie Chan, the martial arts film star whom he regarded as the greatest living actor.

This irrepressibly jovial elf, with a thin streak of malicious devilry about him - he was Puck, hobgoblin - was in recent years most widely known for his own wild and wonderful one-man shows, which embodied the quality of "friskajolly younkerkins" that Kenneth Tynan, quoting the Tudor poet John Skelton, ascribed to Ralph Richardson's famously hedonistic, twinkling postwar Falstaff. He gave up "serious" acting when he realised he was enjoying what everyone else was doing too much, although he did appear in a takeover cast in Yasmina Reza's Art at the Wyndham's theatre in 2000.

On television he appeared memorably as a bent lawyer in GF Newman's Law and Order series (1978) and in one episode of Fawlty Towers. He was Warren Mitchell's neighbour, Fred Johnson, in the sitcom In Sickness and in Health. He popped up bizarrely in films such as A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), very much the same persona, bursting at the confines of a role and never quite fitting another scheme of show business.

With a gimlet eye and a pair of bushy eyebrows that had lately outgrown even Denis Healey's and acquired advanced canopy status, Campbell was a perennial reminder of the rough-house origins of the best of British theatre, from Shakespeare, music hall and Joan Littlewood to the fringe before it became fashionable, tame and subsidised.

When Richard Eyre presented Campbell's Bendigo, a raucous vaudeville about a legendary prizefighter, at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1976, he thought it was one of the most enjoyable things he had ever seen in a theatre (so did I). "Most of Campbell's capers," said Eyre, "look as if they are going to be follies and turn out to be inspired gestures of showmanship."

He had pursued improvisation as a goal in itself in recent years, and had just returned from the Edinburgh Fringe, where he supervised the fleshing out in performance of shows that had no existence whatsoever except in the columns of fictitious reviews written by critics on national newspapers.

I saw an example of this style of riotous work in Cambridge in 2005, when I watched Campbell conduct an inspired improvisational contest in the English faculty between a group of undergraduates and a quartet of visiting Liverpudlian actors. In a sort of Whose Line Is It Anyway? format, Campbell set the tasks, or took suggestions from the audience. We had cod Shakespeare, the Eurovision song contest, enemies seeing each other in a museum, simultaneous singing and "German" acting.
Ken Campbell was born in Ilford, Essex, the only son of Colin Campbell, a Liverpudlian Irishman who worked for ITT, the commercial cable company, and his wife Elsie. He was educated at Gearies primary school in Barkingside and Chigwell school. While at Rada he also appeared with the renowned Renegades, an amateur group in Ilford run by one of Campbell's earliest heroes, James Cooper, who also played the leading roles, painted the sets, manned the box office and talked a lot about Noël Coward.

He was hired by the comedian Dick Emery as his stooge on tour and had a pot of coffee tipped into his lap for daring to gain an unscripted laugh. "I'm the comedian around here," said an incensed Emery, as he poured it. In 1964 he was understudying Warren Mitchell in the West End and showed him a script called Events of an Average Bath Night. Mitchell arranged for a performance, in which he appeared, at Rada. This started him off as playwright, and his Old King Cole (1967) for Peter Cheeseman - another early champion - at Stoke has proved a children's classic.

A chance encounter with Lindsay Anderson led to his key, reactive association with the Royal Court in 1969. He tasted failure as a junior director and decided to change tack completely. He heard that a benefactor at the Bolton Octagon was sponsoring a small "road show" team to spread the good word of the theatre locally. He put in for the job, got it, then broke away from the Octagon. The Road Show brought him back to the Court (Anderson invited them into the Theatre Upstairs) and established his place on the fringe at the first peak of its creativity in the early 1970s.

With another eccentric self-dramatiser, Ion Alexis Will, he wrote The Great Caper (1974), about a search across Europe and the Lapland tundra for the Perfect Woman. The practitioners he now most admired were not the career directors of the day but the liberated, liberating American companies like the Living Theatre, who had appeared at the Roundhouse, and the improvisational group Theatre Machine, whose work was based on the teaching of Keith Johnstone, an assistant director at the Court.

When Eyre took over the Nottingham Playhouse, Campbell wrote not only Bendigo but also Walking Like Geoffrey, an inspired piece of vaudevillian hokum based on the local legend of people disporting themselves in a lunatic fashion in order to avoid paying taxes. Eyre also cast Campbell as Knock'em the horse-courser in Bartholomew Fair and Subtle in The Alchemist; never was an actor more perfectly equipped for the wild excesses and linguistic relish in rare Ben Jonson.

By the end of the 1980s, Campbell's interests in trepanning, teleportation, synchronicity and the Jungian concept of archetypes were fuelling a new career as a solo artist, stitched into a dizzyingly seductive form of theatrical monologue that he delivered in his trademark nasal whine, rocking dangerously on the balls of his feet.

Campbell's three monodramas – Recollections of a Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu at the National in 1993 — were subtitled "The Bald Trilogy" because the (David) Hare trilogy was playing next door in the larger Olivier auditorium. They contain some of the most exciting and entertaining writing for the stage in the past 30 years, on a par with many sections of The Warp, and they won the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award.

He was gloriously on form again in I'm Not Mad: I've Just Read Different Books! (2005), a multiple adventure of some time-travelling cave-dwellers near Turin, a visit to Jeremy Beadle's library, his career as a speaker at pet funerals in Ilford, and a demonstration of real "gastromantic" acting (this involves a lot of arse, as opposed to voice, projection; what Judi Dench does, apparently, is merely "dramatic portrayal"). His heroes included the sci-fi writer Philip K Dick, the Hollywood script fixer Robert McKee and Ken Dodd. His enthusiasms were legion and unshakeable; a maniacal telephone call in the small hours was both a dread and a joy for many of his friends.

Campbell met his wife, the actor Prunella Gee, when she appeared in Illuminatus! They married in 1978, and although they subsequently divorced, they remained close. He is survived by Gee, their daughter Daisy, a writer and director, and two grandchildren, Dixie and Django.

· Ken Campbell, writer, director and actor, born December 10 1941; died August 31 2008

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