REVIEW: MY LIFE WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS by David Benson at Circle and Star in Hampstead & touring
‘magnificent acting skills’ ★★★☆☆
The Pentameters Theatre is dead; long live the Circle and Star. That’s the message from the new team running the small 55-seat theatre space above the Horseshoe pub in Hampstead, for 57 years the undisputed domain of the eccentric but formidable Leonie Scott-Mathews.
Director Steve Furst, a comedian as well as an actor, seems to be signalling the direction of travel with David Benson’s tried and tested one man show My Life with Kenneth Williams – a new version of Benson’s successful 1996 show, revived to mark what would have been Williams’s 100th birthday.
The opening is a delight. It’s simply Benson, in character as Williams, reciting the whole of Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. It’s a very funny poem anyway, and funnier still the way Wiliams would have read it, and it gives Benson the chance to show how precisely he can capture Williams’s voice, his mannerisms, his whole persona.
After that Benson rather loses sight of Williams for a while. Though billed as a show about Kenneth Williams, the first act is more about David Benson himself. We discover Benson at a comprehensive school in Birmingham in the 1970s, coming to terms with being gay, trying not to sound too camp, learning to use his quick humour for protection. “The seventies was all about strikes and bombs.” Er, no, David, it wasn’t.
The best part of this section – which, taken as a whole, is too long and not funny enough - is a wonderful scene where he wreaks belated revenge on a loathsome schoolmaster called Mr Brindley. The moment when Mr Brindley leads the school in a hymn is painfully funny, for the pedagogue sings without joy or variation, as only such a man can sing.
Along the way we get some nice and all-too-brief pastiches of other seventies comedians and comic actors, including a fleeting glimpse of Frankie Howard, and we end Act One wondering what happened to Kenneth Williams.
But Williams is back with a vengeance as soon as Act Two begins. In this act we are told about his demons, his faults, his weaknesses. A lot of this second act is not particularly funny, and is not supposed to be.
The act begins with a monologue about philosophy which goes on too long for what it has to say, and ends with a startling sequence in a restaurant, which shows off Benson’s magnificent acting skills. Though he only speaks as Williams, the performance is so skilful that one can easily visualise the other diners round the table, the waiters, the idiots who come to ask for an autograph, the irritating Americans at the next table.
I am not sure whether Benson loves Williams, or even whether he likes him. Certainly this restaurant sequence shows us a most unattractive figure, selfish, self-centred, entitled, bullying the waiters, abusing his dinner companions, sneering at autograph hunters.
It all goes to make a pleasant evening in the theatre, interesting if you remember Williams (and perhaps even if you don’t), enjoyable and intermittently funny.
Photography by Steve Ullathorne
MY LIFE WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS, written and performed by David Benson, at the Circle and Star in Hampstead.
Website www.mylifewithkennethwilliams.co.uk
2026 UK tour dates
KENDAL
Brewery Arts
Friday 6th February at 8pm
https://www.breweryarts.co.uk/event/my-life-with-kenneth-williams/
STIRLING
Macrobert Arts Centre
Saturday 7th February at 7.30pm
On sale TBC
BEDFORD
Quarry
Friday 13th February at 7:30pm
https://quarrytheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873678233/events
SHREWSBURY
Theatre Severn
Saturday 14th February at 7:30pm
https://www.theatresevern.co.uk/shows/whatson/my-life-with-kenneth-williams/
COLCHESTER
Mercury
Tuesday 17th February at 7:30pm
https://www.mercurytheatre.co.uk/event/my-life-with-kenneth-williams/
GUILDFORD
Yvonne Arnaud
Friday 27th February at 7:45pm
Saturday 28th February at 2:45pm & 7:45pm
https://www.yvonne-arnaud.co.uk/whats-on/my-life-kenneth-williams
GORLESTON
Pavilion
Friday 6th March at 7.30pm
On sale TBC
PETERBOROUGH
Cresset
Friday 13th March at tbc
On sale TBC
EXETER
Barnfield
Friday 20th March at 7:45pm
On sale TBC
WEYMOUTH
Pavilion
Sunday 28th March at 2.30pm
On sale TBC
Running Time
Approximately 2 hours (inc interval)
Age Suitability 12+
