Elsa Edgar
OTHER BOB KINGDOM SHOW INFO:
SYNOPSIS:
Gossip. Surveillance. How do you keep off the blacklist?
High above the glamorous skyline of 50's Manhattan, the terrifying Elsa Maxwell - party hostess and social power broker - drags up for her next masquerade, while J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, checks his files, tightens his grip and slips into something a little more comfortable.
My dear, she knew everybody; Coward and Porter, the Rainers and the Windsors. Making a career out of her legendary ugliness, she dished the dirt on King Farouk, fixed up the Aly Khan with Rita Hayworth... and the only love of her own life, Maria Callas. If you were on Elsa's list, your entry into High Society was assured; once on the blacklist, you were persona non grata to all who followed the social sun.
Elsa's world of masquerade and scandal had a shadow; J Edgar Hoover, eavesdropper, McCarthyite, part-time transvestite and control freak. The FBI was also compiling lists, spreading gossip, dividing the world into the acceptable and the unacceptable.
In an astonishing double-act, solo show legend Bob Kingdom dishes the dirt on paranoia, blacklisting, scandal-mongering and the fine art of deciding just what to wear when you're falling out with the Windsors.
REVIEWS:
"Suave virtuosity" (New York Post)
"Bob Kingdom, as actor and playwright, is onto a good thing... he is in total command of this frightening glimpse into a world that was, in Elsa's words, 'a mere twinkle of a costume ball ago'" (Backstage NYC)
"A fascinating and disturbing double portrait of two of the American Century's most powerful figures... Kingdom portrays both characters, and brilliantly." (The Westsider NYC)
"an absorbing one-man power-play" (The Times)
"It's a witty, pacey script, meticulously directed - almost choreographed - by Robert Gillespie, which never fails to entertain" (Time Out)
"totally engaging and highly amusing... superbly timed, beautifully delivered" (The Stage)
Bob Kingdom
Bob Kingdom grew up in Cardiff, South Wales. Like Dylan Thomas he lived in an Anglicised Welsh environment marked by a tension between two cultures. From here comes a reworking of the English language under the rhythm of Welsh cadences with which Thomas himself was able to colonise the words of the English to surprise, startle and hypnotise. From an early age Bob Kingdom was himself captured by words and language. As a small boy he won literary competitions and distinguished himself in amateur dramatics (amazing adult colleagues with mimicry and an ability to play exceedingly old gentlemen with uncanny conviction.)
In adulthood he quickly established himself in the world of advertising copywriting (pleading guilty to a number of catchphrases and images of the seventies!) Confused with a multiplicity of talents he found himself involved in television voice-overs, poetry readings and as a writer/performer of radio comedy shows (an early member of the satirical Week Ending team, where his Neil Kinnock remains unsurprassed!) In addition to all this he found time to mount his own London art exhibitions.
Few people who saw an early incarnation of Bob Kingdom's Dylan Thomas at the Chelsea Arts Club would have realised the international critical acclaim which would follow, to demand that the show should run seemingly for ever and everywhere. It has been seen in Britain, the United States, Australia and the Republic of Ireland. Indeed it has gone beyond the English speaking world to France, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. On Christmas Day 1990 the Sky satellite network brought Kingdom's Dylan into numerous parlours.
