Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall

By Robert Iles - 9th Jul 2009

Adapting the writings of Spike Milligan must be a daunting task. How do you represent his rambling stories without losing all the good bits, or the audience? Retaining his sense of the absurd must require a particularly clear head, so I approached Ben Power and Tim Carroll's play with interest.

Like many I have read Spike's work and remember his anarchic TV and radio appearances as well as the headlines as he descended into his dark periods and disappeared off the radar for a while. It is perhaps hard to remember how innovative his style was at the time, as it is when we look back on Monty Python or Kenny Everett. They can seem a little raw and naive to us now - people have taken what they did at the edges of comedy and made it mainstream, smoothed the edges, abandoned the bits that didn't work and reduced it to the everyday ... but at the time Spike came over as being on the edge ... when we didn't understand him we felt inadequate, it didn't really occur to us that he simply might not have made sense!

I do feel that in having to abridge the work so much and putting in so many musical numbers we have somewhat lost the thread that Milligan laid down as well as many of the characters and incidents that illuminate his story so well - perhaps the work needs to be more Spike and less music, more mayhem and less structured narrative, more unconventional. We lost a sense of wonder and the production lost the opportunity of mirror the stupidity of the humour with the stupidity of the war he observed from the bottom, a view history often loses as it is not just the winners that write the history but the leaders of the winners.

There is still much comedy in this piece; laugh out loud, groan and smile, and there is also much of the sadness and mental torture of his life but, despite the fact that I and the rest of the audience laughed, the high's are not high enough to make the lows trully effective.

I'm sure that the play will improve with the playing but just at the moment the music is getting in the way a bit - when the musicians play they are still having to concentrate to get it right, jazz has to feel relaxed and natural to come over to the audience, not like an exam piece (and I think some bits were recorded?). Indeed, just at the moment the cast are not yet either good enough at their acting parts to get away with weak playing nor good enough at their music to get away with weak performance - consequently the show simply doesn't come over well. Actually, I think that it would come over much, much better in a smaller space, the sound and story seemed lost in the Bristol Old Vic, which is not a huge auditorium but somehow seemed too big for the production as it stood - if we had all been a bit closer, a bit more cabaret like, then I think it would have worked.

I'd like to see the show again, further into its run, as I really did enjoy the evening despite my comments and I love Spike's humour but tonight, for me, this was still a piece looking for its finishing touches.