This stage adaptation of Spike Milligan’s anarchic war memoirs is an inspired choice for the first in-house Bristol Old Vic production since the closure of the Theatre Royal in June 2007. Told in Gunner Milligan’s own words and owing a huge debt to Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War, the entertainment is a mix of manic humour, wartime hit music and dance routines, laced with real and moving glimpses at the comradeship and pathos of war.
Milligan’s account of his progress through the Second World War, uneven in structure though it is, ends up portraying what the war must actually have been like, not as it has been glamorised by Hollywood.
If this sounds slightly pretentious, neither Milligan nor his two adaptors are having any of it. His chaotic journey through the North African and Italian campaigns bolts on Milligan’s own comedy sketches to the music of the likes of Glenn Miller and Fats Waller, to tell how this totally unprepared group of young men somehow prevailed against Hitler’s war machine.
Sholto Morgan is making his professional debut as the man himself, showing considerable skill in blowing his own trumpet in Milligan’s peripatetic jazz quartet, as well as outlining the author’s own bouts of depression that were the counterpart to his barrage of jokes. The other four cast members are talented musicians, as well as versatile players, and director/adapter Tim Carroll is particularly skilful at combining the black humour with what Noel Coward called the potency of cheap music.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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