Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers review – inside the mind of an actor in meltdown

Narrator Rory Kinnear fully inhabits Klaus Kinski’s fury in this depiction of the irascible actor’s ill-fated performance in Berlin In 1971, the German actor Klaus Kinski performed a theatrical monologue called Jesus Christ Saviour at the Deutschlandhalle arena in Berlin, but things didn’t quite go to plan. A controversial figure in his lifetime, Kinski was irascible, egomaniacal and prone to violent temper tantrums. The film director Werner Herzog famously worked with Kinski on movies including Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo and later filmed a documentary about the actor’s unhinged antics called My Best Fiend. The antipathy went both ways: in his memoir, Kinski fantasised about Herzog dying of the plague or being eaten alive by ants. In his experimental novella Jesus Christ Kinski, Benjamin Myers attempts to get inside the mind of the actor during his ill-fated Berlin performance when, having cast himself as the messiah, he was laughed at and heckled by onlookers, some of them demanding their money back. The show gradually dissolved into a slanging match between Kinski and his rapidly dwindling audience. As narrator, the actor Rory Kinnear energetically inhabit