On two nights last week Bernard Richards gave a one-man show (scripted by himself) about Kingsley Amis in the appropriate setting of his subject’s old college, St John’s. It was only the second time I had visited the attractive little theatre there, which explains why I got slightly lost among the various quads and buildings (more like a whole university campus than a college) of this very rich institution.

The first occasion was in the early 1990s when I saw the fine (and much-missed) actor Bruce Purchase give the premiere of Johnson is Leaving (concerning Samuel Johnson) written by his, and Bernard’s and my friend John Wain. He was a pal of Amis’s, too, in their time together at the college. Later Sir Kingsley turned on him mightily — at any rate in the abuse-laden letters he exchanged with his greatest chum Philip Larkin, another St John’s contemporary.

I think John was unaware of their dislike of him. He always spoke especially fondly of Larkin, whom he acknowledged as the finest poet of his time. I recall him proudly showing me a postcard from him in the back bar of the King’s Arms in Holywell (where you’ll still find a photograph of Wain). He had been carrying it around for some days. (Seamus Heaney was another poet whose genius he was never slow to proclaim.) Amis’s animus towards John might seem surprising considering that Wain had offered a very handy plug to his friend’s first novel, Lucky Jim, on his BBC radio programme First Reading in April 1953 before it even had a publisher. But maybe it is not surprising, given the dismaying propensity of some people to turn on those who have helped them.

That Amis was a decidedly rum cove ought to have shone out more clearly, I felt, from Bernard Richards’s show Kingers, which its author hopes eventually to see on the professional stage or as a television programme.

Richards, the long-time Fellow in English and now an Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College, asked me to see the show and give a forthright opinion about its likely future success.

For its try-out, with Bernard attempting to show us Amis with the script in front of him, the effect was more that of a reading than a performance. He has an actor in mind to take on the title (indeed only) role in any future production but I obviously can’t say who this is. Whoever it is will have his work cut out learning the lines: a solo effort lasting an hour and a half is immensely hard to commit to memory (as I remember Bruce Purchase finding with Johnson Is Leaving, further performances of which I was later to see at The Swan Theatre, in Stratford, and at the Old Library in Christ Church during the Oxford Literary Festival).

The future of Kingers will depend very much on Amis’s own survival with the reading public. In his long and well-argued programme note, Richards quoted a recent book review by A.N. Wilson from the Times Literary Supplement in which Amis and John Fowles were said to be joining the ranks of the unread. Their reputations were, said Wilson, “crumbling before your eyes, like exhumed bones exposed to ultraviolet”.

In this connection, as I pointed out to Bernard, he would do well to devote more of Kingers’s running time to Amis’s relationship with, and opinion of, his writer son. The name of Martin Amis is likely to remain a powerful ‘draw’.

Richards explained in the programme note that “this show does not seek to argue the case for Amis as a writer: it is more concerned to present the case of him as a sort of phenomenon”.

Then let him seem more phenomenal, I would suggest. Explaining two of the well-known peculiarities about him would make him at once seem so.

The first was his fear of flying, which he developed at the age of ten. As his biographer Zachary Leader explains succinctly in the chronology at the start of his 1,200-page edition of Amis’s letters: “After a five-shilling ‘flip’ in a small aeroplane at the Croydon Aerodrome, Amis is put off flying for the rest of his life.”

The second is his terror of being alone at night. It was this that made it necessary for him to return to live with his first wife Hilly following the break-up of his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard. Nor was it only with Hilly since she was now on husband number three (not two, as Bernard’s programme note stated). As Amis’s health began to deteriorate — and even before — this husband, Lord Kilmarnock, took on a role in his life not hugely different in some respects from that of a valet.

Since Kingers begins, though, at precisely the moment that this bizarre menage was being established — with Amis lugging his books and bottles into 186 Leighton Road, NW5 — showing its development would naturally be a problem.

Richards has already written and performed one-man shows on Shakespeare, Byron Dickens and Johnson, so can speak with some authority on the subject of adaptation, which according to him “requires more or less no skill at all”.

In an amusing jibe at television’s most famous adapter, he writes in his programme note: “Too many people these days accrue praise for adaptations. I’m thinking especially of Andrew Davies, who has spent years accumulating kudos, and, worse, money, from the business of adaptation. Whatever Davies is paid, and his confrères, it is much too much.”