★★★

“a jack of all trades, struggling to fully realise the richness of the themes it taps on”

Art reckoning with the covid-19 pandemic is still emerging, rather than established, with many of us only beginning to process its impact from a distance. Fickle Eulogy steps into this uncertain space, attempting to navigate a fresh, complicated loss, and understand who or what is responsible for it.

Ann is pacing the kitchen rehearsing her mother’s eulogy, panic bleeding through her pauses as she straightens her outfit and worries when to take the cheesecake out of the fridge. In an hour, family and friends will arrive ready to celebrate her mother’s birthday, as requested, instead of a funeral. An Alexa device chips in with warnings of “negative language” and a charged tone, sending Ann back and forth in her ruminations as she scrambles for the perfect tribute.

It’s a compelling and emotional set-up, but one with a deliberate stop-start rhythm, thanks to Alexa’s interruptions. These in-scene resets do allow for some moments of sharp character work, exploring themes and anxieties Ann has about her mother’s death. A chirpy meditation practitioner and a gun-loving American are brash and cartoonish, effectively spotlighting the absurdity of pandemic-era discourse and the blurred lines between holistic and pharmaceutical health. Online misinformation becomes an uncanny and cabaret performer, whispering mistruths and hatred to a rapt audience. These moments were bold and ambitious, but too fleeting to sustain momentum, disappearing just as they began to really intrigue.

As the creator and sole performer, Nikol Kollars brings a commanding stage presence, amped up by Javier Galitó-Cava’s direction. Her versatility is proven through her vocal talent, and the adoption of strange and heightened characters, where she’s able to find a balance between embodying the forces to blame for her mothers’ death and mocking them. Lighting and sound design from Koa Salazar, alongside original music from Frederic Wort, helped ground the piece and provide a sense of resolution. The stage was set for a reckoning of the power of technology against human life, but the Alexa sits on it relatively unchallenged. It practically hums with untapped possibility. Similarly, gnarly topics like conspiracy thinking and the responsibility we owe elders are skimmed over without really delving in.

For all its ambition, Fickle Eulogy becomes a jack of all trades, struggling to fully realise the richness of the themes it taps on. It does land on a moving final note, with Hawaiian song bringing a nostalgic emotional clarity to Ann’s pre-party jitters. Ultimately, it’s a production which accurately mirrors the fragmentation of pandemic grief, but perhaps a little too closely, leaving us scattered and searching for a spark.

MY LIFE WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS

Circle and Star Theatre

★★★★

“an atmosphere of bumbling nostalgia and jolly engagement”

You can still hear it, can’t you? That fantastic nasal twang – like an outraged gale howling through the adenoidal alps.

“Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it infamy!”

Kenneth Williams’ most famous deprecation was broadly rebutted at the Circle and Star Theatre where the raconteur and actor was revived and lauded, the audience laughing in fond memory of those famous flaring nostrils and Munchian cheeks.

The “Infamy” pun came from Carry On Cleo, in which Williams played Julius Caesar. In this production, he is the centurion as the revival marks the comedian’s 100th birthday on 22nd February 1926.

Williams died in 1988 aged just 62 – possibly by his own hand – but his flaming torch has been carried by David Benson whose impressions and re-creations are impeccable, dark and textured.

Benson burst on to the scene 30 years ago with Think No Evil of Us: My Life With Kenneth Williams and he revisits his legendary portrait in this nationwide tour.

Check the title for an accurate summary of this intriguing, if occasionally unbalanced, show.

It’s My Life With Kenneth Williams. Williams gets second billing. This is especially true of the first act – one for the Boomers as Benson says. He takes us back to the mid-1970s when, as a young lad in Birmingham, he would immerse himself in the stars of the Radio Times. He didn’t want to impersonate them, he wanted to be them – Captain Mainwaring, Eric Morecambe, Peter Sellers, Sergeant Wilson. We get them all, immaculately.

His hero, though, was Spike Milligan. He pored over the scripts of The Goon Show, went to see the great man at the Queen Alexandra Theatre and employed his madcap surrealism to every creative endeavour up to and including his chemistry homework.

The culmination of this fandom was the Milligan-esque story he sent to a Jackanory competition. He won out of 15,000 entries and his entry – about a rag and bone man – was read out by… one Kenneth Williams.

The young Benson was devastated. Williams did the voices wrong, he thought, and, worse, he was so camp. Benson, finally recognising his sexuality, was terrified he would be outed by association.

This extraordinary true tale comes complete with a sing-along school assembly under the direction of irascible Mr Brimley and a genuine recording of Williams reading The Rag and Bone Man. It is played out with great affection by Benson, who creates an atmosphere of bumbling nostalgia and jolly engagement. He is, after all, a writer of pantomimes.

The warmth is in stark contrast to the icy blast that follows.

We have to wait, and wait (perhaps too long) for Kenneth Williams. He arrives in the second act in a few scandalous vignettes that aim to capture not only the star’s vocal range and the endless talking but his unpleasant snobbery and visceral stomach complaints. The logorrhea and diarrhea, one might say.

In this anecdotal show, you come for David Benson and meet, along the way, Kenneth Williams, although perhaps not the Williams you would wish to meet. The former is pleasant company, the other is a self-pitying, self-loathing and casually cruel wretch. Infamy, infamy, Williams might say.

David Benson muses whether his lifelong obsession with Williams is compensation for that first ungrateful reaction. But, he adds, unlike those other 70s heroes, he wouldn’t want to be the troubled, salacious and tortured artist. Not for one minute.

By the end, we understand why. Even Williams couldn’t tolerate himself.

Through all this, Benson is alone and unsupported on the stage except for a chair and a spotlight. And yet one-man show seems too inadequate a description, numerically speaking.

Tag Archives: Circle and Star Theatre

FICKLE EULOGY

★★★

Circle and Star Theatre

FICKLE EULOGY

Circle and Star Theatre

★★★

“a jack of all trades, struggling to fully realise the richness of the themes it taps on”

FICKLE EULOGY

Circle and Star Theatre

Reviewed on 7th April 2026

by Jessica Hayes

Photography by Mattia Sedda

FICKLE EULOGY

FICKLE EULOGY

FICKLE EULOGY

MY LIFE WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS

★★★★

UK Tour

MY LIFE WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS

Circle and Star Theatre

★★★★

“an atmosphere of bumbling nostalgia and jolly engagement”