Terence Alan Milligan, always known as Spike, was an amalgam of comic genius and wild man, an inspired wordsmith who could sink into troughs of paralysing depression. Michael Ciaran Parker, professionally known as Barrymore, has also had his burden of troubles and, while his appearance in Richard Harris’s new play isn’t his first professional acting job (he played Jerry Flynn in Chicago), the role of Spike is his first essay at straight acting unassisted by music.
Actually, music does play a modest part now and then. Best to pass over Barrymore’s merry attempt to play the trumpet, but when he steps forward to give one of Spike’s stand-up routines - the best part of the evening - he persuades us to join in the immortal Ying Tong Song, dividing us, panto-style, into those who are to sing “ying tong”, others who will trill “yiddle-eye”, and the brave volunteer in the centre of the royal circle who finishes the line with “po”. This brings the curtain down - literally, as it closes the first half.
Harris bases his play on the memoirs written by Norma Farnes, Spike’s agent and manager for what must have been an exhausting, yet exhilarating, 36 years. The two of them are on stage throughout the evening, except for those moments when Spike storms off in sudden rage or Norma decides that he’s shouted at her once too often, silently dons her coat and stalks away from the office in moderately high dudgeon. Eric Sykes is quoted in the programme as saying that while Spike’s wives (three in all) knew the outside of him, Norma knew what went on inside. So it’s a pity that details of this interior take the length of the whole play to wriggle into view.
On a split-level set of office and den, backed by panels reproducing some of Spike’s animal doodles, we have been taken along a switchback of highs and lows that provide mildly intriguing details of his chaotic way of life, almost always ending with a verbal shrug from Norma and a cut to the next dollop of chaos.
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This makes for a jerky show, made harder to follow by the difficulty that Jill Halfpenny, playing Norma, finds in making her voice consistently audible to those in the far seats. Barrymore is physically less shambolic than Spike but catches the flashes of charm and that sense of inhabiting a quirky world only fitfully touching ours.
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