My first professional job was at The Watford Palace Theatre.
I was familiar with the beautiful theatre as my mother took me regularly to see all sorts. I liked the front row, touching the stage and smelling the grease paint.
I went to Watford School of Music aged thirteen. Studying to be a concert pianist under the tutelage of Daphne Spotiswood who disliked me intensely, Working class gels with an attitude was not up her strassa.
The room I had my classes in was the very room I had my audition to get my equity card.
In 1970 getting an Equity card was the passport into the industry. It was a closed shop a company had to take a punt on you. Watford took me in.
The first show we did was ‘Old King Cole’ written and directed by Ken Campbell.
A maverick genius who shaped the likes of Bob Hoskins, Jim Broadbent and Nina Conti.
I found Kens notebook, scribbled in the margin he’d written
‘Jeni Barnett is good at telling jokes’
I played princess Daphne. I was given the very wonderful Stephanie Cole as my mother, Queen Brenda. Ms Cole taught me to stay schtum unless the correct line was given. We could spend upwards of twenty minutes as the actor, who shall remain nameless, fluffed and mumbled his way through the script. When he gave the correct line off we went.
My first ever complaint came from he town council.
‘Get em off and stick ’em in the washer’ was an audience prompt I got the children to shout. The town council were appalled.
When the run came to an end I went o Leicester and then to Newcastle with two writing buddies. We lived in a rat infested house where I practiced yoga and made shepherds pie. They wrote in the upstairs bedrooms.
Nothing came of it.
Unemployed and frustrated I returned home.
‘Phone Ken’ nagged my mother.
On her old yellow telephone under the stairs, I wound the cord round my finger and dialled his number.
‘Do you want to make a couple of films and tour Israel?’ he asked
‘Yeah OK.’ I said as nonchalant as you like.
I was billed as Jennifer Joy and so began a maniacal few years.
‘There must be Something in the Water’ was the history of Sadlers Wells.
Sylvester McCoy, bit the head off a live chicken and Bob Hoskins played Grimaldi the clown. I’ve still got that script.
Then we did the ‘History of Pantomime.’
Chris Langham turned up with David Rappaport, in his rucksack. David, a dwarf, would settle into the bag and they would travel on the tube, conversing and weirding out the other passengers.
Zoe Wanamaker and I were the women. She went off to a glittering career as a classical actress. I didn’t.
Then we went on the road. Like all good troubadours there was no money but a good deal of mischief. We collected money in a hat as we did street theatre. On the canals in Frankfurt I hammered nails up my noise. In Munich I put ferrets down Sylvester McCoys trousers, in Israel I exploded fireworks on a concrete slab on Sylvesters chest.
‘Bombs haven’t we had enough mit bombs’ said a lone voice at the Kahn Theatre in Jerusalem.
I drove through the desert to Jericho, fending off the taxi driver who wanted more than Shekels.
Ken was ferocious, I spent a day with a balloon. Letting it off from the wings, and saying ‘Bizarre’ over and over until I got the inflection right. I don’t think I ever did.
On the back of Marcel Steiners motorbike we wobbled over the cobbles to Amsterdam, and finally into the courtyard of The Royal Court Theatre. A motorbike was named the ‘Smallest Theatre on Earth’. One audience member sat in the side car as Eugene Geasley performed Shakespeare Diddy Geasley, a small actor, gave his all to the likes of Samuel Becket, who squeezed into the side car. I was the lighting crew, shining a torch through the sidecar window.
We ended up at the Edinburgh Festival.
Rehearsing on Arthurs Seat, dressed in a sack and a hessian hat I played Kens’ handmaiden.
‘Stone Henge Kit The Ancient Brit in the End of the Woad’ a mad caper written by himself.
I had to cook dog meat in a wigwam, on stage every night and paint the furry bum of Alan Devlins costume, a wonderful Irish actor, with coffee stains to make his character Pan, look like he’d soiled himself.
I made false teeth out of orange peel. Campbell would ask me
‘What don’t I like?’
And with a mouthful of water I would splutter over the front row.
‘Schnappy answers.’
Ken wanted me to learn ventriloquism. I refused, and went off to start a theatre group with another band of lunatics.
Two nights ago I put on a documentary about Nina Conti.
She talked about working with Ken, she had become the very ventriloquist he had wanted.
And then a five second unexpected moment of a photograph of Ken and a girl in a sack.
There I was from fifty years ago gracing the tellybox, orange teeth in tact.
I rewound the film and froze the picture.
My life passed before my eyes.
When Ken died his funeral was wild. The coffin was decorated, Ken’s voice blared out into the crematorium, a man threw himself on top of the coffin wailing. Kens’ dogs pulled the coffin on a sledge to an open grave. A lone clarinetist, wearing a kilt, played and everybody who had ever worked with him turned up. We cried as the mournful music accompanied the man as he was lowered into the moist earth.
You live and then you die, it’s what you put in the middle that makes a life. I was lucky enough to meet the wild eyed Campbell.
‘Jeni Barnett is good at telling jokes’ Those scribbled words changed my life.