KENREX – Southwark Playhouse Borough

Jack Holden in KENREX at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London. Picture: Manuel Harlan

KENREX continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough, London until 15 March 2025.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Actor and storyteller Jack Holden’s debut play, 2022’s Cruise, was a truly astonishing piece of theatre. Retelling the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis through the memories of a caller to a present-day LGBT hotline, Holden conjured up a world that was both lost and still present. In combination with a score composed and performed onstage by John Patrick Elliott, Cruise was a vibrant shot in the arm for the concept of what a one-person narrative play could achieve.

For their latest collaboration, Holden and Elliott move across the Atlantic to retell a notorious true crime incident. First staged last year at Sheffield’s Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, KENREX tells the story of the Missouri town of Skidmore – so small that it does not warrant its own police officers, the nearest being an hour away. That law enforcement vacuum allowed the rise of one man, Ken Rex McElroy (known as ‘Kenrex’), to terrorise the town – until the residents of Skidmore exacted their revenge.

Holden (who has co-written the piece with director Ed Stambollouian) plays every resident of Skidmore himself, relying solely upon vocal tics and physical carriage to deftly create a panoply of instantly recognisable characters. Nowhere is this more evident than for Kenrex himself, where a simple raise of the shoulder and slight stoop is enough to transform the amiable Holden into a horrifying, Mister Hyde-level villain.

With so many characters to portray, there is a risk of resorting to caricature. And while that comes closest to playing out with the portrayal of McElroy’s wily lawyer, Richard McFadin, every one of Holden’s portrayals is vital, lived-in and immediately recognisable.

Elliott’s music, dominated by guitars (both electric and acoustic) but with a multilayered sound that makes it sound like a full band, draws on American folk and Western sounds to create an evocative score. That’s supplemented by Giles Thomas’ astonishing sound design, by turns subtle and clamorous, and by Joshua Pharo’s similarly strong lighting. Without the audio-visual trickery, Holden’s storytelling would be enthralling; with this staging, it is nothing short of mesmeric.

As with so many true crime tales, the compelling narrative comes hand-in-hand with a competing sense of revulsion and fascination. Holden and Stambollouian’s script plays with those sensations, most tellingly in the character of Ken’s wife, Trena, who he first met and groomed when she was 12 years old, and whom he married in order to escape charges of statutory rape. The portrayal of someone so vulnerable who, in the presence of her husband’s evil, becomes as twisted as he is forms the most intriguing and chilling facet in the whole tale.

The crime that tops and tails the play (mostly related in flashback, as witness testimony) remains officially unsolved. That has led to books, TV movies and webcasts speculating on what happened. Holden and Stambollouian’s assumptions about the case seem reasonable, but it is not the conclusion but the journey. KENREX feels like it transposes Skidmore into a small theatre in Southwark, making us live and breathe the fear of Ken McElroy that its residents have.

There is such a thrill when watching KENREX that one feels it is surely the theatrical event of 2025 to date. It may even be the event of the year; any show over the next ten months will undoubtedly have the highest of bars to clear if it is to claim the title.

Scott Matthewman