“KENREX” at The Other Palace
Franco Milazzo in Central London
★★★★★
12 December 2025
There are towns where everyone minds their own business, and then there are towns where everyone minds everyone else’s business. Kenrex, which debuted at Sheffield Theatres last year, made its London debut at Southwark Playhouse, and now barrels onto its next stop at The Other Palace, concerns the latter. It tells the true story of Ken Rex McElroy, the sort of rural menace who seemed to believe “neighbourhood watch” was just something else for him to steal alongside their pigs and cows, and the day the townsfolk finally decided they’d had enough.
Jack Holden.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
Enter Jack Holden, who tackles this entire menagerie of Midwestern psychology all by himself. In lesser hands, a solo show about an American bully met with vigilante justice might feel like a lecture from your drunk uncle. In Holden’s hands, it’s a full government hearing on violence, fear, and rural bad decisions, only vastly more entertaining and conducted by someone with actual talent.
Holden’s transformations are so quick and precise he could probably impersonate the entire front row before the interval. One moment he’s Kenrex, all swagger and predation. The next he’s a witness, a frightened neighbour, or a prosecutor exhausted by the legal system’s inability to handle someone with McElroy’s unique blend of greed, brutality, and stupidity. And it’s not just monologues: often, Holden plays out both (or, in one case, all three) sides of a conversation with little more than changes in voice and stance.
Director Ed Stambollouian (who co-wrote the play with Holden – a very different project from the latter’s recent adaptation of The Line of Beauty at the Almeida) keeps the staging stripped back. This minimal approach turns the show into a moral pressure cooker. There are no props to hide behind, no ensemble to pass the blame to; just Holden, the truth, and the audience squirming as the evidence piles up.
Relegated to one corner of the stage, John Patrick Elliott’s live Americana score hums beneath the action like the ghost of a doomed country radio station. It twangs, aches, and rattles in all the right places, underscoring the creeping sense that this town has been waiting far too long for justice, and is now ready to accept it in any form, legal, or otherwise. The lighting design (Joshua Pharo) and sound design (Giles Thomas) work overtime to make the stage feel both vast and claustrophobic.
What lifts Kenrex above your typical true-crime retelling is its understanding that the real horror isn’t the villain but the community’s complicity. By the time the townsfolk finally get around to dealing with McElroy, the show has laid out every moral flaw like exhibits in a courtroom: the fear, the silence, the bureaucratic failures, the collective shrug that says, “Well, what else were we supposed to do?”
Holden delivers the finale with the calm inevitability of a man reading out stock market losses. There are no easy answers, no tidy resolutions, just the unsettling truth that sometimes society functions not because of the law, but because the law momentarily stepped outside for a cigarette.
Kenrex is gripping, taut, and wickedly alive. It’s a razor-sharp morality tale delivered with the force of a shotgun blast and the finesse of a seasoned raconteur. It’s theatre that demands you confront the shabby corners of human nature, preferably before they confront you. And thanks to Holden’s virtuoso performance, it’s also a damn good night out.
