“Kenrex” at The Other Palace – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The London UK Theatre Review: Kenrex at The Other Palace

By Ross

‘911, what’s your emergency?’
‘My husband… they shot him… they all did.’

It’s July 10th, 1981, Missouri, and in that sharp introduction, Kenrex at The Other Palace arrives like a sucker punch to the chest. Brilliantly theatrical, intoxicating, and electrifying, it wastes no time announcing itself. The evening begins with a surprising blast of live country music performed onstage by John Patrick Elliott (Apollo’s Cruise), whose intrepid score and performance supply both propulsion and atmosphere, instantly grounding the production in a Southern American soundscape that feels rough, lived-in, and volatile. What follows is a hypnotic one-person show that tells the true story of a town terrorized by a bully who had evaded justice for years, until one moment, when human vulnerability pushed everything and everyone too far. It is part true crime, part Western, and entirely gripping.

The stage, designed by Anisha Fields (RSC’s King Lear), resembles a stripped-down sound stage. Numerous microphones on stands ring a single chair and a large reel-to-reel tape recorder, creating an open, flexible playing space that allows the incomparable Jack Holden (Almeida’s The Line of Beauty) to command the room with his astonishing kinetic energy and appeal. Initially, we hear a recorded interview between an FBI investigator and David Baird, an out-of-town district attorney, recounting a shooting death in Skidmore, Missouri, a town so small it does not even have its own sheriff. As the recording continues to play, Holden gradually takes control of the narrative, slipping seamlessly from tape to live presence, asking the compelling and igniting question that drives the piece forward: “Where does this story begin?“

Structured in chapters with titles like “The Town,” “The Bully,” and “The Lawyer,” the script by Holden and director Ed Stambollouian (West End’s Night School) carefully assembles a portrait of a community living under the volatile rule of Ken Rex McElroy. Holden dynamically portrays dozens of characters at different microphones, with subtle shifts in posture, voice, and rhythm shaped by Giles Thomas’s precise sound design and Joshua Pharo’s sharp lighting and video work. A 911 call pulls us briefly into the aftermath before the story rewinds, allowing us to understand how the town reached this breaking point. Ken, defended repeatedly by his slippery lawyer McFadden, has never spent a night in jail despite a history of violence and intimidation. The arrival of his new young wife, Trina, and a perceived insult against her becomes the final spark that sets the town ablaze.

Holden’s performance is an astonishing feat of endurance and control. He skips, stalks, and dances across the space with a feral country music energy that never feels indulgent. Guided by Stambollouian’s direction, Elliott’s live music runs alongside the action like a radio blaring from an open pickup truck window. Rock and country bleed into moments of visceral brutality and dread, reinforcing how violence becomes normalized when fear is allowed to fester.

What makes Kenrex so unsettling is its refusal to offer easy moral comfort. The town ultimately takes justice into its own hands, unconsciously nudged forward by a lawyer who still believes in the sanctity of the law. When the townspeople tell him, “You don’t know what you’ve done,” they are not wrong. Produced by Aria Entertainment and running just over two hours with an interval, the show is relentless but never gratuitous. It understands that justice does not always arrive through the typical channels, and that the cost of waiting for the law to take control can be unbearable. Kenrex is raw, exhilarating theatre that grips like the best true crime while asking an older, harder question. What happens when the law fails, and everyone knows it?