Jason Watkins is a special needs teacher and tutor for pupils out of education based in Otley, West Yorkshire. He previously worked in TV and as a film researcher. The judges praised his “lively, casually erudite style, in the best tradition of Anthony Burgess’s own work for the Observer”.
In naming his daughter after the Greek goddess of discord and misrule, maverick director/actor/playwright Ken Campbell gave her a lot to live up to. Pigspurt’s Daughter, a solo show by Daisy Eris Campbell to mark the 10th anniversary of her father’s death, is a window on a remarkable parent-child relationship bound by a love of logic-defying overstimulation and an aversion to anything routine or everyday.
“Loomed large” is the key epithet for Ken Campbell’s life and work, and when meeting his adult daughter his opening gambit would often be: “Done anything of note lately?” A celebrated provocateur, his legendary stage productions included 22-hour plays and pidgin English versions of Shakespeare. Campbell cut an imposing, eccentric figure, someone who would literally wear his obsessions on his sleeve. This is brought to life when, amid the clutter of her father’s career, Daisy Campbell dons his iconic fishing jacket, which doubled as his “office”. Pigspurt’s Daughter is about moving out of the shadow of a daunting, challenging genius while retaining a deep, abiding love for him.
Rather than sombre memorial, the play grapples with loss via a welter of fringe and countercultural topics. Among other things, it takes in particle physics, neurology,the Cathars, divination, self-discovery workshops and the end of the world, which on paper sounds like being cornered by a foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorist. However, Daisy Campbell manages to channel the poetic flow of the rant and the tirade into a piece of storytelling that is absurdist high drama and a moving chronicle of living in the orbit of goading, demanding brilliance.
What emerges is that Ken Campbell bequeathed an ethos of belligerent anti-mindfulness to his daughter, instilling a love of heady, outlier views and philosophies. For both, life and art is about bombarding the mind and relishing the connections and coincidences that materialise. In a play overloaded with themes, a key motif emerges: what happens to the self when you devote your life to the anarchic and the arcane? Pigspurt’s Daughter reveals the psychic toll of the quest for ideas that confound rather than confirm expectations.
Campbell talks of being sectioned wearing rainbow-coloured knickers on her head and being pronoid (the opposite of paranoia – everyone is conspiring to help you). She describes her exhaustion after working with the KLF, the band that burned a million pounds. Campbell organised the band’s darkly carnivalesque 2017 comeback. Asking the reasons behind their freewheeling demands, she was told: “If we knew why, we wouldn’t do it” – an uncompromising, gnomic approach that chimes with her father’s directorial style. He would tell his actors: “I will give you impossible things to do then shout at you when you can’t do them.” This metaphysical unruliness is the territory of a loosely aligned group of rebel thinkers and seekers drawn to the wellspring of discordianism (a shifting ground of conspiracy theory and trickster doublespeak designed to enlighten through bewilderment; a Zen politics that undercuts bedrock ideologies, granting glimpses of “the real truth”). Pigspurt’s Daughter is in part a valediction to the conceptual excess of discordianism, of losing oneself in a headlong rush of tumultuous notions and beliefs, and becomes a tale of finding structure, meaning and emotional truth.
As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that storytelling itself is central to Campbell’s relationship with both her father and the world at large. When she was 11, her father took her to an intense three-day seminar on story structure by screenwriting guru Robert McKee. McKee’s models and jargon percolate through the whole of Pigspurt’s Daughter. Setups, payoffs, negation of a payoff (or twist) and the “negation of the negation” all recur and shape the narrative, creating an underpinning compositional knowingness that belies the play’s rambling, digressive feel.
Pigspurt’s Daughter deals with the loss of a towering individual. Nina Conti, protege and lover of Ken Campbell, went through a similar exorcism with her touching film Her Master’s Voice, and Daisy Campbell finds suitably outre metaphors for her father’s stature and her personal loss. At one point she is trapped, crushed and buried under the mass of material in her father’s archive. She bows out with a tall tale about gaining a licence to disinter her father, becoming increasingly hysterical (in every sense) as her plan comes together.
In Pigspurt’s Daughter, spurning reality looks like gruelling fun. In truth, discordianism has become less enticing in an age of global chaos and disinformation. Yet, while boisterously cartwheeling through a dense array of peripheral, underground subjects, Daisy Campbell succeeds in conveying many things – remembrance and self-assertion, fantasy and confession, grief and joy. The play imparts a very personal message: never revel in the ordinary, cherish those near and dear to us, and don’t go (too) mad.
• Read the rest of this year’s shortlisted entries in the Observer/Anthony Burgess prize
