Watching Roy Smiles's remarkable play about Spike Milligan, I was reminded of an encounter I once had with the great comic writer Eddie Braben. Sitting in his Liverpool study, Braben talked about the insufferable pressure of writing the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show knowing that 20 million people would be watching. But, while Eddie happily kept his sanity, Spike periodically lost his: a subject Smiles treats with compassionate verve.
What makes Smiles's play, which started life at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, so original is that it tackles Spike's clinical depression in Goon Show style. Set in a psychiatric ward and a BBC studio, it shows a bedbound Spike devoured by his comic creations and his madcap colleagues. Doors fly open to reveal a singing Secombe or a naked Sellers demanding the name of a good tailor: even the shrink transmogrifies into Wallace Greenslade. Smiles suggests that Milligan's mixed identity and wartime memories may also have contributed to his breakdowns. But, in the end, the play is about every writer's nightmare: that he will be consumed by his own fictions.
Smiles's play is also extremely funny. It evokes the Goon Show's mix of hurtling narrative, surreal sounds and eccentric voices while reminding you it was the revenge of stroppy privates on the officer class. And the four actors, in Michael Kingsbury's production, are well cast. James Clyde captures Milligan's strange melancholic subversiveness. Peter Temple suggests that Sellers was a dazzling mimic in search of an identity. Jeremy Child accurately embodies the Establishment types the Goons set out to dismantle. And Christian Patterson uncannily evokes not just Secombe's Celtic mania but the private man's fundamental goodness.
The Goon Show was more than just zany comedy: by suggesting that the only proper response to pompous authority was a defiant raspberry it helped to undermine a deferential culture. But the point of Smiles's large-spirited play is that the Goon Show changed 50s Britain at the expense of its creator's sanity.
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