Master showman is top of Bill

The West End, they tell us, is mortally ill: impossible parking, sleazy environment, Coca-Cola at £2; do you wonder nobody goes to the theatre any more? Except, of course, that they do, and one reason they come in by the coachload is the management of Bill Kenwright, who currently has 30 productions on his schedule.

At this point an interest has to be declared: when, a couple of years ago, I finally got fed up with being told that a drama critic is someone who knows the way but can't drive the car, it was Bill who let me take the wheel. Even though I had only ever directed on the fringes of the fringe, he trusted me to stage Noël Coward's A Song at Twilight at the Gielgud on Shaftes-bury Avenue with a cast of three Redgraves. We ran seven months and, I think, even made him a little money, which is why he is about to entrust me once again, this time with a revival of Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden in the autumn.

At a time when most of the producers he started with have either taken premature retirement or cut back to maybe two or three plays a year, Bill still operates like an old-style Hollywood mogul, and his new office block in Maida Vale would not have disgraced Louis B Mayer in the golden days of MGM.

Not bad for a lad born in the war-devastated Liverpool of 1945, but Paul McCartney and George Harrison, his fellow pupils at the Liverpool Institute, did pretty well, too. Acting roles in Z-Cars and Coronation Street did not spawn much further work, so Kenwright took to producing his own shows, the big break coming when he acquired the rights to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream-coat. His production toured the UK for 13 years.

This week, he brings an all-star cast (led by the actress Jenny Seagrove with whom he has lived for the past eight years) into the Apollo for the first West End revival of Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife in a quarter of a century.

So why do it again now? Ken-wright offers a simple answer. "Maugham is how the English theatre got from Oscar Wilde to Noël Coward, and I'd already done most of Wilde and Coward."

In addition to his stage productions, Kenwright also has a new film in pre-production (it'll be his fifth - Liza Minnelli in Stepping Out was about the best of the others), a television series, and he mortgaged his house and all possessions to raise £8 million of the £22 million he needed to buy Everton Football Club. Jenny had to sign a legal document stating that in her opinion he was still just about sane.

Let nobody doubt the priorities: Everton photographs outnumber even the six Tony Awards on Bill's office walls. This week, his team is celebrating a narrow escape from relegation, which means that next season it will become the first soccer club in history to have played 100 unbroken years in the top division.

I've always thought of Bill as the great theatrical juggler: keep enough shows on the road, in rehearsal, in and out of town, and nobody sees where the money goes. For years, employees and journalists alike have been asking him the only unanswered question: where does his money come from?

"Everyone has always wanted to know that: they fantasise laundered Mafia money, or Arabs with pots of gold. I never raise it myself," says Kenwright. "I go see my bank manager in Brighton; he advances the money and I make sure I pay him back, sooner or sometimes much later. I've only once been on the edge of broke, and that was a very hot summer about 14 years ago when I had seven shows in the West End, but nobody was going to any of them."