Ying Tong

Synopsis

Under pressure to write The Goon Show to end all Goon shows, Spike Milligan is planning his escape from a mental institution dressed in only his pyjamas. After applying to the British Museum to get his marbles back, he starts to lose his grip on reality and threatens to kill Eccles, the most famous Goon character. Ying Tong is an hilarious and touching insight into the mind of comic genius Spike Milligan who was an inspiration for comedians from Monty Python to The League of Gentlemen and loved by many including Nicholas Parsons and Prince Charles.

Our Review:

15 February 2005

Not so much a scream of a comedy as a silent howl from that very private, painful and tortured offstage place that so many stage and television comics, from Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams and Peter Cook, for instance, seemed to inhabit, Ying Tong is the latest in a growing genre of plays that seek to take the lid off the pot and establish what ingredients went into making the comic feast that the protagonist was capable of.

In this case, Roy Smiles has focused on the clinically depressed Spike Milligan at a time when, institutionalised St Luke’s Hospital in Muswell Hill in 1960, his Goon Show colleagues Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe try to lure him back to write just one more series of the radio series that had made their names over the previous nine years.

While Round the Horne...Revisited, currently also in the West End, hilariously revisits the recording studio as episodes from that eponymous Sixties comic se...

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Latest User Review

194.82.50.2) - 15 March 2005:

The "dead comedians" motif continues to provide a rich theatrical vein with this depiction of Spike Milligan's time in a psychiatric hospital in 1960, as the Goon Show was drawing to a close. His neuroses are intertwined with both the manic, groundbreaking radio show and his World War II experiences to pretty good effect. Fans of the Goons will enjoy the renditions of Milligan's highly influential humour. All four performances are good although Jeremy Clyde's Milligan often sounds a little too like a cross between Tony Hancock and Steptoe Jr, while Christian Patterson cuts a very convincing and sympathetic figure as Harry Secombe, as well as deftly capturing his high-pitched brand of motor-mouth humour, making him for me the star of the show. One minor negative point: it could do without the token performance of The Ying Tong Song, but that's just my quibble. It's a shame this is closing early as it deserves better. If you read this in time, I recommend you try to get along before this weekend and catch this entertaining, touching play. ...

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