We make allowances for genius. Well, at least in men. Norma Farnes did for 36 years, first as PA to Goon show writer and comic poet, Spike Milligan, and subsequently as his manager. But mostly what she did was play mummy to a man who could bring audiences to their knees weeping with laughter, but who was often down on his own weeping with despair as "a thousand grim winds" roared in his head.
Milligan suffered from bipolar disorder in an era when the condition was less well understood. It was both his curse and his gift. Inspired by Farnes' memoir of their time together, Richard Harris's enjoyable but over-cosy play offers up two Milligans: one an inspired workaholic who was so generous that he gave his money away to strangers, the other an infantile demented womaniser who leaves chaos in his wake and seems genetically programmed never to say sorry. Michael Barrymore, who plays Spike, is good at the former, but less convincing in the latter role. It is as if the actor never wants to show himself as anything other than a lovable teddy bear.
This perfectly serviceable stuff is clearly a West End try-out in
Edinburgh, but like so many gossipy biography plays, its determination to concentrate on the man and not his work sells the latter short. If you went into this show knowing nothing of Milligan's writing, you'd come out with the impression that all he wrote was a few comic limericks and a bit of poetry. The doodles around the edges of Edward Lipscomb's design are the closest we get to understanding the completely dotty world going on inside Milligan's head, into which we were sometimes lucky enough to peep.
