But Sholto Morgan, who combines mischief with a hint of delirium, is a wonderful Spike. My only cavil about the production is that it could acknowledge the audience more through the choreographed spontaneity that was Joan Littlewood's hallmark. A particularly violent and potentially fatal bombardment produces the following exchange: 'Anyone hurt?'– 'No.'– 'Well, annoyed then?' It's not Oscar Wilde but there's a wild felicity about the choice of adjective. At one point he is left, like some submerged Beckettian derelict, to guard a hole in the ground at another, he hears a regimental sergeant major bark: 'Silence when you're speaking to an officer.' But what also comes across is Milligan's ability – the source of his later comedy – to play with the possibilities of the English language. But what comes across is a unique individual's take on war, in which boredom and bewilderment are relieved only by mateship, piss-taking and the holy communion provided by a jazz quartet.Īny whiff of wartime nostalgia, induced by hearing songs such as Lay That Pistol Down Babe and Honeysuckle Rose, is subverted by Milligan's faultless eye and ear for the prevailing craziness.

Accused of joining his unit three months late in 1940, he announces: 'I'll make up for it – I'll fight nights, as well.' Eventually, he sees action in north Africa and Italy, is promoted to lance bombardier, and then stripped of his rank and winds up in a psychiatric hospital. But the show also charts the zigzag progress of Milligan's mad war. The evening takes the baggy form of a concert party: a mix of songs, sketches, reminiscences and jazz from the D Battery Quartet Spike created in 1940 from his Royal Artillery Regiment. And the result is a joyously funny, gloriously ramshackle evening that reminds us that the war was the matrix of Milligan's comic imagination: out of its chaos and absurdity came the Goon Show, which was the ultimate revenge of the ordinary soldier on the officer class. But this adaptation by Ben Power and Tim Carroll is the first attempt to put his four books of military memoirs on stage. W e recently had a play about Spike Milligan's nervous breakdowns.

My part in hitler's downfall