SPIKE Milligan’s satirical comedy, The Bed-Sitting Room, co-written with John Antrobus, opened at London’s Mermaid Theatre in 1963, and was a success in the capital and when it went on tour.
At a press conference on the eve of the play’s week-long run at Glasgow’s Alhambra in July 1967 Milligan introduced the cast – or, as he playfully called them, “a travelling unemployment exchange for layabouts and actors”. He described The Bed Sitting Room, which was set in the aftermath of the third world war, as a “brilliant night of absolutely nothing”.
The play did not impress the Glasgow Herald’s drama critic, Christopher Small. Noting the presence of some “antique, good-humoured, humane ... veteran gags”, he said they stood out with a noble solidity in the shambles around them, and that Milligan had a tender feeling for them.
“Furthermore, in this elaborately lunatic charade he, or his persona – the extravagantly tattered, shuffling, scratching, winking, finger-to-nose-laying tramp – appears the most nearly sane creature there, partially detached from what is, after all, his own phantasmagoria.”
The notorious thing about the play is that it was “mad”, “and madness, as everyone knows, is in itself exquisitely funny. It also confers absolute licence, so that anything can be said, and everything is equally to be giggled at. ...”
Milligan’s comedy consisted “for the most part of the disjointed obscenities, blasphemies, scatologies which are the stuff of schizophrenic fantasy, but it is schizophrenia with the anguish removed”.
From start to finish, the play’s content was all matter for undifferentiated mockery, which destroyed whatever satiric or pathetic effect was intended.
At the end, with a line from Yeats and a hint of sentiment, Milligan seemed to be going through the motions of at least touching the sensibilities. “But it is much too late by then, for an audience long since reduced to laughing automatons. It is really pretty horrible to see.”
Monday: Milligan at the Fringe
Read more: Herald Diary: https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/19333329.diary-hard-times-readers/
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